Movies depicting Asperger’s and Autism – good, bad & ugly.

There is mixed opinion regarding movies that depict conditions on the autistic sprectrum – and there is a spate of new releases coming up.  Here are some of them:

The clay animated feature “Mary & Max” opened the 2009 Sundance movie festival.  It deals with the pen-pal relationship of a 44-year-old New Yorker, who has Asperger’s and lives on chocolate hot dogs, and a lonely 8-year-old Australian girl.  The motivation for the film is said to have come from letters spanning 20 years, between Adam Elliot, a young Australian, and a middle-age pen pal in Staten Island who he later learned had Asperger’s.

The clay animation process has a Wallace & Gromit feel and must be painstaking – and the movie reputedly took Adam Elloit five years to make.  Although this is an animated feature, it has enough tics, neuroses, addictions and emotional wounds to say that this definitely isn’t intended for children.

Just released is “Adam”, directed by Max Mayer and starring Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne.   ”Adam” is a simple love story in which the lead character has Asperger’s – and the attendant trouble navigating social interaction and the strange rhetoric of dating.  The tale seems to ask whether Adam so different than any other person struggling to find emotional intimacy?

The movie was screened pre-release in Boston last month to the Asperger’s Association of New England.  “We hope this movie becomes the Rain Man of Asperger’s,” said Dania Jekel, director of the Asperger’s Association of New Eangland on their website.  ”When people talk about autism they say, ‘Oh, you mean like Rain Man?’  So maybe when people talk about Asperger’s they’ll say, ‘Oh, you mean like “Adam?’”

Also coming up is a movie which seems to have been in the pipeline for quite some time depicting the life of autistic icon, Dr Temple Grandin.  This is an HBO project entitled “Temple Grandin” and starring Clare Danes.  This movie is now in post-production, so presumably it will be released in the cinemas before long.

Personally, we’re all looking forward to seeing this, although there has been a lot of controversy about the movie with the New York magazine asking whether a neurotypical actor can ever play someone with a neurological disorder without seeming pompous and self-important at best, or horribly exploitative at worst?

Here’s hoping that Clare Danes focusses more on playing the person, scientist, author and animal behavior expert Temple Grandin – and less on playing the autistic Temple Grandin.

“Eagle vs Shark” has been out for a while.  It is a New Zealand movie that is ‘on the spectrum’.  It does need some parental guidance and it deals with adult relationships and Asperger’s.  “Eagle vs Shark” has a mixed bag of reviews with some scathing and some great comments amongst the 100 or so reviews posted on the movie review site www.rottentomatoes.com.

The movie sits somewhere between “Mozart & The Whale” and “Napolean Dynamite” – although with enough interesting and uniquely New Zealand aspects to differntiate it from either of these.  An AspiesonTV blog review says that despite the dark aspects of the movie, it is a fairly sympathetic look at two characters with Asperger’s Syndrome.  A link to the trailer is posted by Dr Kev Appleton on the BrightMind LABS Facebook Page.

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