Movie review: Mozart and the Whale

Proof of a good movie/fiction: it makes you feel you are one of "them."

A list I made after watching Mozart and the Whale last weekend:

• Avoidance of looking into others’ eyes: check

• Difficulty reading body language and interpreting sarcasm or irony: check

• Self-destructive behaviors like nailbiting: check

• Loss of temper over insignificant events like the movement of a belonging: check

• Find comfort in routine and repetitive behaviors: check

• High-pitched, irrational laugh: when nervous, check


After watching the movie, about two young adults with Asperger’s syndrome and their group of fellows with autism, I felt like maybe I was on the autism spectrum myself. By the end of the movie, it is clear that there is no “typical” person with autism; each manifests his or her diagnosis in different ways. The great strength of this quirky, slow moving, affective film was showing the wide spectrum and deep humanity of the autistic adults, so that the viewers identify with the group of odd birds who form a strong bond of friendship. Most poignantly, the two main characters suffer the same conflicting pangs of desire and doubt, attraction and alienation, that “normal” people undergo when they fall in love.

When I was in college I spent a fair amount of time working with special needs kids and adults, although they were called disabled then, an upgrade from handicapped. One summer I was a camp counselor in the Upper Peninsula for kids whose syndromes ranged from spina bifida to severe ADD to Down’s. It was perhaps the hardest summer of my life, but by the end of it, I knew and loved each of the children by her name, not by her diagnosis.

Another year for my service work in college I went to feed lunch once a week at an adult day care. Nearly all of the clients were wheelchair bound with severe physical and mental disabilities. Feeding lunch wasn’t just serving a meal; it was sitting down and spooning food into someone’s mouth, scooping back in what drooled out, and if necessary, tipping his head back so the food would go down his throat. But perhaps more heartwrenching was meeting the parents. One couple I remember in particular was a couple at least in their seventies who came to the day care with their son, who was in a wheelchair. I cannot describe his disfigurements. But his parents were devoted to this disfigured person.  He was their son, not a person confined to a wheelchair for life, someone who would never feed himself. They necessarily worried about what would happen to their son after their death. I don’t know the end of the story.

But I know that I am extraordinarily blessed. My children have their issues, but I think they will be able to take care of themselves as adults (and maybe one/some of them will take care of me when I’m in a wheelchair…). But they will have to suffer when they fall in love, just like the Donald and Isabelle in Mozart and the Whale. I would spare them that pain if I could, but it is a pain that is redemptive, as they shed their own desires, modify their own routines, sacrifice their own comforts, in order to make space for their beloved’s.

An interesting link http://edwardbyrnepoetry.blogspot.com/ a booklength poem about autism by a poet in Indiana, Edward Byrne, found via the blog list of A Commonplace Blog.