RAIN MAN Review
From the outside, Barry Levinson’s RAIN MAN looks a lot like any other Oscar branded fluff piece with its acclaimed star duo matchup and unique enough story centered around people overcoming the odds. As it turns out, the cinematic telling of the Babbitt Brothers literal road to reconciliation mostly overcomes its acquiescent Oscar aspirations to become an overall endearing ride.
This is thanks in large part to that aforementioned star pairing of Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman as the estranged Babbitt Bros. . As the cockier of the two, Cruise plays Charlie Babbitt, a hustler decked out in those yuppie polos of yesteryear. A not at all lovable asshole at the film’s beginning, Cruise’s Charlie sees people and life as giant opportunity to get what’s yours whether that involves his dealings of imported automobiles, his fraught relationship with his girlfriend (Valeria Golino), and of course his scorched relationship with his estranged father. When his old man does kick the bucket, Charlie, borderline annoyed at another distraction headed by his dad, heads to his father’s funeral more intent on learning the contents of the man’s will rather than paying respects. Of course, Dad only leaves Charlie some rose bushes and a nice (if unwanted) 1949 Buick with the rest of the man’s valued $3 million sent off to some other mysterious beneficiary. Royally pissed, Charlie goes to track down this random beneficiary and take back what he believes his father owes him.
Of course, life (and writers Barry Morrow and Ronald Bass’ script) have a funny way of working out for old Charlie. You see, as Charlie himself discovers, the mysterious heir to the $3 million is none other than Charlie’s long lost brother Raymond (Dustin Hoffman), an autistic savant currently institutionalized. With his organized tics and bouts of nerves, Raymond presents an existential threat to not only Charlie’s “deserved” inheritance but to his whole life as well. Never one to settle for a loss, Charlie more or less kidnaps his older brother from his institutional home in order to wring out the $3 million from the institution setting the two brothers on a road trip of supposed self-discovery and understanding.
So yes, RAIN MAN is a movie that will definitely go on the offensive regarding its assault on the viewer’s emotions. But even so, despite its obvious themes of acceptance and kinship, Levinson’s film nevertheless feels like it has true heartfelt intentions with its story. As someone who isn’t too accustomed to the lives of autistic people (especially those in Raymond’s shoes), the idea of a non-autistic person playing an autistic feels a tad icky, not to say that Hoffman’s portrayal is offensive (at least in a cartoonish way). From what I’ve seen other critics say, Hoffman did do some homework by working and studying autistic people to get the portrayal just right and again, while the idea of his performance seems a tad off, ethically speaking, the actual on-screen performance is probably as good as you could want. The more showier performance compared to Cruise’s straight man role, Hoffman’s Raymond is a sympathetic and complicated figure, even outside of his aforementioned diagnosis. While there are some moments in the film where Hoffman (and the script) gets a little too showy with Raymond here and there, Cruise is right there to keep things grounded. Indeed, despite the previous “straight man” denomination, Cruise’s Charlie slowly but surely becomes an intriguing protagonist, one who goes through the obvious growth of finally being a good person, but also a man whose family was seemingly taken away from him. When these two men (and their performances) intermingle in moments of familial reckoning, RAIN MAN effectively soars as an engrossing and highly tragic tale of a broken family and the two sons left to pick up the pieces.
While the two brother’s journey goes through its fair share of hijinks and confrontations, mainly as a result of Charlie getting used to living with the complicated life of Raymond, Levinson takes his time letting the audience get used the two men’s growing rapport and schedule. This results in a film that feels slightly repetitive as Charlie and Raymond pass through one town to another on their destination to sunny California, bickering one moment and making up the next, with Charlie doing most of said bickering and reconciliation. While John Seale’s cinematography effectively captures the character of each town or city that the Babbitt Bros pass through, RAIN MAN kinda just kicks around for its 2 hour or so runtime. While there are definitely sequences in here that effectively meld aspects of a serious familial drama with that of a slightly off-kilter road buddy comedy (with just the slightest sprinkling of some poker-centric thrills), RAIN MAN is effectively just watching Cruise and Hoffman deliver lines with gusto for about 2 hours.
Despite its broad appeals, Levinson and co. never shield their story from the realities of the Babbitt Bros’ situation. Especially in those 80’s years, autism and many other related psychological diagnoses were still relatively new and as a result most people such as Raymond were looked on as any other mental patient. But as the film and Charlie come to learn, there’s a lot to be found in the complicated Raymond and a lot to love and cherish, however, in Charlie’s case, sometimes the care you want to provide to a loved one isn’t always the necessary one for said loved one. When the film approaches this thought in its final thirty minutes, Charlie and the audience get put through an emotionally devastating ringer with just the right amount of hope. While it would’ve been nice for RAIN MAN to approach its subject in this manner in the hours before its final third, the overall ride with the Babbitt Brothers makes for an enjoyable (and potentially even eye-opening) experience.
3.5/5
