text: I've just returned from a showing of "My Left Foot" at our public library. What an emotional experience -- I feel drained and uplifted.<br /><br />It's the story of Christy Brown, Irish writer and painter, and based on the author's autobiographical "My Left Foot." Christy was born with a form of cerebral palsy such that the only limb he had good control of was his left foot. Doctors advised his parents he was hopelessly mentally retarded but his mother didn't give up on him and, somewhat as Annie Sullivan had done with Helen Keller, helped him achieve a breakthrough in which he learned the alphabet and then to read, write, and paint.<br /><br />This film won Academy Awards for Daniel Day-Lewis (best actor) as well as best supporting actress for the actress playing his mother; it also received Oscar nominations for best picture, best director, and best adapted screenplay.<br /><br />As a retired clinical psychologist and family therapist, while many films may entertain me, many also often leave me having to overlook gross fictions or improbabilities in realistic psychological reactions.<br /><br />Not this film--it was absolutely "spot on" in portraying typical Irish parental roles & behaviors (see, e.g., see typical Irish families in McGoldrick's "Ethnicity & Family Therapy") as well Christy Brown's uneven emotional maturation--some immature personality reactions that were even further amplified by his picking up traits of his father.<br /><br />The film presents the greater truth while changing certain sequences in his development (painting & writing) and condensing several important people into one person, for the sake of telling a coherent, believable story, not burdened by small, distracting, less important actualities. (See Christy Brown in Wikipedia for more accuracy.) The DVD version we were shown had some English subtitles that were a great help in understanding Christy's speech (& some of the Irish speech); the initial release of the film may have lacked this. (If you see this on DVD, enable that option.)<br /><br />The performance by Daniel Day-Lewis is one of the greatest, believable acting jobs I've ever seen. Truly magnificent, outstanding, superlative.<br /><br />"My Left Foot" bears more than some similarity to a more recent film, "The Diving Bell & the Butterfly," in that each portrays the life of a real person successfully surmounting the imprisonment and isolation of an extremely severe physical handicap.<br /><br />And in doing so, it resonates with William Ernest Henley's "Invictus" which begins: "Out of the night that covers me,//Black as the Pit from pole to pole,//I thank whatever gods may be//For my unconquerable soul."