Autism on film: can cinema get it right? | Film | The Guardian Film blog Autism on film: can cinema get it right? Variety critic Leslie Felperin responded to her son's diagnosis by watching every movie about autism she could find Rain Man ... cinema's most famous portrait of an autist – starring Dustin Hoffman, right, as savant Raymond Babbitt – is also one of its least accurate Monday 4 April 2011 11.24 EDT First published on Monday 4 April 2011 11.24 EDT Share on Messenger Close Some parents go into understandable denial when confronted with the evidence that their child is on the autism spectrum, and some become consumed with a zealous need to seek a cure or ameliorate the symptoms with therapies. Given my profession, my way of dealing with our three-year-old son's diagnosis of an autistic spectrum condition (ASC) has been to try and understand the condition as best I could through reading books and watching movies about people with autism.

So for the last two years, my husband Tom and I have been working our way – frequently in tears, sometimes laughing with recognition – through as many features and documentaries about people with the condition as we could source. It seems to me from where I'm sitting (on the sofa and in the cinemas) that there are far more, and many more varied, cinematic depictions of autism than there ever were before. No doubt this has something to do with the fact that, now, the condition is much more frequently diagnosed. We started our home autism film festival, naturally enough, with Barry Levinson's Oscar-winner Rain Man . For many people – myself included – this was their first exposure to the notion of autism, and back in 1988 I was rather impressed with it. Now, having been a film critic for 20-odd years, and more importantly after learning so much about ASC, the film seems deeply flawed – both aesthetically (it's more mawkish and slow-moving than I remembered) and in terms of how it treats the condition, promulgating as it does the very misleading notion that people with autism are likely to be savants with incredible memory skills, when the vast majority of them aren't.

Even more irksome is the way the main function of the story's autistic character, played by Dustin Hoffman, is to serve as a vehicle for delivering redemption – and, due to aptitude at card counting , a big bag of blackjack money to Tom Cruise as his shallow, car-dealer brother. Several other films have deployed autistic characters in a similar way – as quasi-holy innocents whose narrative function is to inspire those around them to be better people. There's Nell (1994), for example, in which Jodie Foster's autistic backwoods woman helps Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson, playing her doctors, fall in love. Snow Cake (2006), in which Sigourney Weaver's high-functioning autistic inspires Alan Rickman to get over grief for his dead son, is slightly less cringe-inducing than Nell, thanks largely to Weaver's more credible, tics-and-all portrait. But something has seemed to shift seismically in the last five years or so, and people on the spectrum can now feature as proper protagonists, with the condition no longer their only defining characteristic.

In the case of Bollywood megahit My Name Is Khan (2010), Shahrukh Kahn's title character's Muslim faith is just as important, and as much an engine for the film's baroque melodrama, as the fact that he has Asperger's syndrome , a form of high-functioning autism. Adam (2009) is a far from perfect romantic drama, but at least it shows Hugh Dancy's eponymous "aspie" hero trying to have a sexual relationship with a neurotypical woman (ie someone not on the spectrum) rather than just inspiring others to fall in love. Of the recent crop of features about people on the spectrum, one of the strongest is biopic Temple Grandin , a made-for-HBO movie (it screened on Sky Atlantic on Sunday night) about arguably the world's most famous person with ASC. Based extensively on her own autobiographical writings, the film follows Grandin (played as an adult by Claire Danes) through her childhood and young adult years as she learns to use her own growing understanding of her condition as a means to gain insight into how animals think, ultimately becoming a veterinary scientist.

Deeply cherished in our house for its scabrous honesty is Mary and Max (2009), an animated account of a penpal friendship between a young girl in Australia and a middle-aged man with Asperger's which doesn't stint on showing the alienation and loneliness experienced by people with the condition. Some of the recent documentaries made about autism are even better, not just in terms of explaining and illustrating the nature of ASC but also as examples of excellent film-making. This year, the Thessaloniki documentary festival showcased some of the very best, alongside films about Down's syndrome and other conditions, and programmer Elena Christopoulou was kind enough to send me several DVDs from the showcase. There are roughly two types of documentaries about autism: overviews, which tend to feature an ensemble cast whose degree of impairment spans the spectrum, and single-subject stories that follow one person or a family through a particular period. Of the overviews, the two best I've ever seen are The Autism Puzzle , made in 2003 but still very relevant, and the last year's Neurotypical .

The Autism Puzzle is freely available online and skilfully blends stories about people with ASC (including director Saskia Baron's own brother) into a history of the condition's discovery, and interviews with experts. Neurotypical concentrates more on giving a voice to people with the condition who see autism not as a disability but as a difference to be proud of. My favourite bit features a highly articulate man with ASC who recalls crying as a child at the end of Disney's The Jungle Book because he couldn't bear to see Mowgli join the human village, a world he felt he'd never been accepted into. The single-subject stories deal with a similar range of people and an even more heterogeneous range of attitudes about autism. Some depict families intent on finding ways to "recover" their children from autism with alternative therapies ( Beautiful Son , by Don and Julianne King, and to an extent The Horse Boy by Michel Orion Scott), and some focus on those deeply damaged by institutionalisation (including actor Sandrine Bonnaire's harrowing account of her own sister's autism, Her Name is Sabine ).

I was most moved by several lyrical studies that chose to celebrate without pity or despair how people with ASC see the world differently and find their own way to communicate with others, such as the haunting How I Am (Ingrid Demetz, Caroline Leitner), about a near-speechless teenage Italian boy whose sometimes-poetic subtitled writings punctuate the film. Equally uplifting and wry is 2010's Wretches and Jabberers (directed by Geraldine Wurzburg), a kind of road movie featuring two autistic men who also communicate through typing, travelling the world to meet other autism advocates and to change attitudes towards the link between disability and intelligence. Félix Fernández de Castro's wise, accepting and funny Maria and I opens up through a mixture of animation and live action a Spanish artist's affection for his profoundly autistic daughter. Perhaps the most effective strictly as a film is Billy the Kid (2007, directed by Jennifer Venditti), a portrait of an awkward teenage boy living in suburban Maine who struggles to fit in, court a girl and overcome childhood traumas.

It's eponymous subject was only diagnosed after the film was made, and somehow the very fact that the word autism isn't even mentioned once makes the piece all the more potent and universal. It stands as a reminder that people with the condition are first and foremost individuals – not just the labels applied to them. Interacting with Autism USA1988(133 min) rainm This breakthrough Hollywood film established a new standard for the realistic representation of autism. Basing his portrayal of Raymond Babbitt on close observations of two real-life individuals with autism (including the son of Ruth Sullivan, the first president of the Autism Society of America), Dustin Hoffman gave a brilliant performance that enabled his character to assert his presence with intensity. The strength of this intensity helped humanize not only his self-centered brother Charlie (Tom Cruise) in the story but also us spectators in the movie theater. For, it enabled us to better understand how the individual with autism perceives the world. Proving popular with audiences worldwide, the film won four Oscars—for best film, best director (Barry Levinson), best original screenplay (Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow) and best actor (Dustin Hoffman).

This success enables us to use the film as a gauge for measuring how subsequent representations of autism have changed or remained the same. Two aspects of the film now seem more troubling than they did to most viewers in 1988. By choosing to make Raymond an “autistic savant”—one who combines certain deficiencies in social interaction, language and sensory processing with extraordinary abilities in math and memory—the film helped establish the “savant” as a misleading stereotype for all individuals on the autism spectrum, since only around 10% actually display this pattern. Even the film’s primary scientific consultant, Dr.

Darold Treffert (the world’s leading authority on the autistic savant syndrome), acknowledged (in an interview with Adam Feinstein in The History of Autism), “There is a danger of walking away from the movie with the impression that all autistic persons are savants and that all savants are autistic.” Yet, he claims: the film’s positive impact offsets this risk for it “did more to bring autism and savant syndrome to the public attention than any other public-education effort had done up until then.” Even more problematic, despite Raymond’s high-functioning abilities and his brother Charlie’s willingness to take care of him, the film concludes that he and presumably other individuals with autism are better off being institutionalized rather than living with their own family. This position is radically different from today’s prevailing view—both in movies and in real life—where there is now more emphasis on “inclusion” in activities with neurotypicals and more hope for how individuals with autism can change. Yet, in his interview with Adam Feinstein, Dr. Treffert defended the film’s position by claiming, “The main message of the movie [is] that there is no six-day cure for autism and that it is really Charlie who changes, not Raymond….

Charlie’s accommodation with, acceptance of, and appreciation for his brother at the end of the movie—rather than the stereotypical rejection and ridicule…is a message for all society. We need to make those same changes—and we are really beginning to do just that.” Not until the 2010 release of the bio-pic on Temple Grandin, would we find another realistic fiction film that focused primarily on a person with autism and showed us how she is also capable of change. According to Stuart Murray in Representing Autism, Rain Man helped establish “the autism movie” as its own genre. Turning out to be a sub-genre of family melodrama, it was dominated by stereotypes that oversimplify the complexities of the disorder. Yet, given the extraordinary success of the film, it established a series of narrative patterns, which are still followed in many later films about autism, both in fiction and documentary: 1) The story emphasizes the impact of autism on all members of the family, some of whom have autistic symptoms in milder form and deep-seated guilt over their inability to “cure” their child.

2) The story focuses on the relationship between an individual with autism and a neurotypical, exploring how both are affected by the relationship and what kind of future is possible for their interaction. 3) The story features a conflict over whether the individual with autism should be institutionalized or kept at home, or (more recently) a choice between enrollment in a special school or inclusion within regular classes. 4) The film contains a diagnostic scene where a medical expert or scientist defines the disorder—a scene frequently followed by instances where the individual with autism demonstrates these behaviors. 5) The film includes some shots that represent the autistic pov—e.g, although Raymond becomes absorbed with the strongly graphic abstract patterns on the road, once he gets to Vegas he keeps his eyes on the TV set instead of looking up at all the flashy neon signs (which threaten him with sensory overload). 6) The film includes a “Cinderella” make-over, where the individual with autism is dressed up to look more “normal” for some special performance. In Rain Man, Charlie takes Raymond to get a new suit and new haircut so that he won’t attract attention in the Vegas Casinos.

The popularity and prestige of Rain Man enabled it to establish both this familiar narrative pattern and the stereotype of the autistic savant. According to Stuart Murray, both Rain Man and Mark Haddon’s novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), “served as foundational explanatory markers of autism for different generations,... fictions that almost achieved the status of sociological documents in the ways [they] engage(d) in a zeitgeist moment.” This dimension is even more significant when you consider that most people “learn perspectives on disability from books and films more than from policies or personal interactions,” an observation that applies not only in the US but worldwide. In Unstrange Minds (2007), anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker claims “the success of the movie Rain Man, which parents of autistic children in every corner of the world have seen, didn’t hurt autism awareness.” He reports having met a “well –respected pediatrician” in India in 2005 who ran a large pediatric clinic and who admitted, “Honestly, Professor, I wouldn’t know if an abnormal child in my office had autism or not...

But I did see Rain Man with Dustin Hoffman, so I might be able to diagnose an adult.” Even back in 1994, when autism was still a strange word to most people, whenever Grinker mentioned his daughter was autistic, people would ask, “You mean like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man?”. This identification with a fictional character also affected individuals with autism.

In An Anthropologist on Mars(1995), Oliver Sacks describes an autistic savant named Stephen who “has a veritable passion for Rain Man and, one must suspect, identifies with the Dustin Hoffman character, perhaps the only autistic hero ever widely portrayed.” Marveling at how Stephen “reproduced or represented entire characters, their interactions, conversations, and voices,” Sacks claims “he often seemed nourished and stimulated by these, but at other times taken over, possessed and dispossessed by them.” Sacks is left wondering whether Stephen’s repetition of Rain Man was “just a literal playback, a mimicry or echolalia, or was it charged with a sense of the significance of the film.” The world would have to wait before another equally compelling fictional film about autism, Temple Grandin, came along to challenge Rain Man’s representational status, as it created new standards of realism and hope.

Marsha Kinder 7 Actors Who Have Played Characters with Autism – Kerry Magro ­ 7 Actors Who Have Played Characters with Autism Earlier this year we came out with a blog on 5 Actresses Who’ve Played Characters with Autism to spotlight the world premiere of Jane Wants a Boyfriend, a film focused on a young woman with Aspergers trying to find love in New York City. With that we wanted to follow this list up by looking at some of the actors who’ve portrayed characters with autism as well! Check out our list of 10 Films to Learn More About Autism to see what is out there for our community to enjoy! Josh Hartnett (Mozart and The Whale) Hartnett who is known for films such as Black Hawk Down and Pearl Harbor took one of his most impressive roles when he portrayed Donald Morton, a young adult with aspergers syndrome in Mozart and The Whale. Hartnett’s love interest in the film was another young adult on the Asperger syndrome portrayed by Radha Mitchell who was highlighted in 5 actresses who’ve played characters with autism here.

Hugh Dancy (Adam) In 2009, Dancy gave one of his best acting performances when he took on the role of Adam in a romantic comedy also starring actress Rose Byrne. In the film Dancy shows several different dimensions of the transition to adulthood through transitioning to living alone (after Adam’s father dies) and finally, falling in love for the first time. Max Burkholder (Parenthood) Parenthood, which just had its series finale, lasted 6 seasons on NBC and focused on a show about several different families. One of these families featured actor Max Burkholder who played Max Braverman, a young boy with aspergers syndrome. His portrayal of Max was seen as one of the most realistic portrayals of someone with autism on television. Dustin Hoffman (Rain Man) Arguably the most well known autism related film of all time, Rain Man in 1988 won four Oscars including Best Actor for Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of Raymond in the film, an adult with autism. Thomas Horn (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) Horn may not be a household name but after his performance in the film Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close he definitely showed his amazing acting chops.

Horn who plays a boy with Asperger’s syndrome goes on an adventure to solve his father’s final riddle after he died in the 9-11 attacks. Lou Taylor Pucci (Story of Luke) This indie film showed several different topics focused on adults with autism. Lou Taylor Pucci plays a young adult on the spectrum that needs to navigate the world around him in a film also starring actor Seth Green. Dexter Darden (Joyful Noise) Finally, the last character I wanted to share is Dexter Darden who played Walter Hill in the 2011 motion picture hit Joyful Noise starring Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton. In the film Darden plays a teenager with Asperger’s syndrome. Darden has followed his portrayal in this movie to start in the box-office hit Maze Runner and will be returning to his role in the sequel coming out later this year. Related Posts Rain Man Disease: Savant Syndrome and Brain Dysfunction By Mary Kugler, RN - Reviewed by a board-certified physician. Updated November 28, 2016 The 1988 movie introduced people to a rare but amazing disorder called savant syndrome .

In the movie, Dustin Hoffman sensitively portrays the character Raymond Babbitt, who has autistic disorder. When Raymond's brother, Charlie, comes to visit, he discovers that Raymond also has an astounding memory for baseball statistics, the phone book, and the ability to count cards in Las Vegas. Savant Syndrome Occurs with Brain Dysfunction Savant syndrome is extremely rare. People with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autistic spectrum disorder may be born with savant syndrome, but it can also develop later in childhood or even adulthood after a brain injury or with a certain type of dementia (this type is referred to as acquired savant syndrome). Savant syndrome occurs more frequently in males than females. Range of Skills in Savant Syndrome People with savant syndrome have an amazing memory that is very focused in one area. The most common behaviors demonstrated by people with the syndrome are obsessive preoccupations with: trivia (facts about U.S. presidents, for example) license plate numbers maps or obscure items Some people have startling artistic or musical abilities. For example, one man can hear a piano concerto only once, then play it perfectly. Other people with the syndrome have outstanding mathematical skills, such as being able to perform complex calculations within a few seconds.

Some can also perform calendar calculations, meaning given any date past or future the person can tell what day of the week it is. Formerly Called Idiot Savant People with savant syndrome were described in the medical literature as early as 1751, but the name "idiot savant" was not applied until 1887, when Dr. J. Langdon Down (who also named Down syndrome) coined the term. It referred to the fact that people with savant syndrome were thought to have very low IQ ("idiot" in the terminology of the day) but yet were very knowledgeable ("savant" from French savoir, to know). There are some dramatic examples of the condition exhibited by Individuals who score very low on IQ tests. These individuals demonstrate exceptional brilliance in a specific area, such as musical ability, art memory or mathematical calculations, while at the same time having social and developmental problems. The more dignified and accurate term "savant syndrome" is now used, although it is not recognized as a mental disorder. Some refer to the condition as " autistic savant ," but only about half the people with the syndrome are also autistic.

Savant Syndrome Statistics At the moment there are no definitive statistics done by an objective party about the number of people with savant skills. There are estimates that 1 in 10 people with autism has savant skills in varying degrees. Scientists believe that studying savant syndrome will provide clues about brain function. They believe that finding out what causes the syndrome could provide information about what ​ intelligence really is and how different types of memory work within the brain. Perhaps this type of research might discover that there are special abilities inside each person, a hidden genius or prodigious talent waiting to be tapped. Sources: Rain Man (1988) - IMDb IMDb 17 January 2017 4:34 PM, UTC NEWS There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error Selfish yuppie Charlie Babbitt's father left a fortune to his savant brother Raymond and a pittance to Charlie; they travel cross-country.

Director: From $2.99 (SD) on Amazon Video ON DISC a list of 25 titles created 17 Mar 2011 a list of 29 titles created 11 Apr 2012 a list of 35 titles created 12 May 2012 a list of 38 titles created 09 Sep 2013 a list of 40 titles created 15 Aug 2014 Search for " Rain Man " on Amazon.com Connect with IMDb Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Won 4 Oscars. Another 22 wins & 21 nominations. See more awards » Videos Lt. John Dunbar, exiled to a remote western Civil War outpost, befriends wolves and Indians, making him an intolerable aberration in the military. Director: Kevin Costner At the close of WWII, a young nurse tends to a badly-burned plane crash victim. His past is shown in flashbacks, revealing an involvement in a fateful love affair.

Director: Anthony Minghella A Mumbai teen reflects on his upbringing in the slums when he is accused of cheating on the Indian Version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" Directors: Danny Boyle, Loveleen Tandan Stars: Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Saurabh Shukla A young Shakespeare, out of ideas and short of cash, meets his ideal woman and is inspired to write one of his most famous plays. Director: John Madden A seventeen-year-old aristocrat falls in love with a kind but poor artist aboard the luxurious, ill-fated R.M.S. Titanic. Director: James Cameron Ted Kramer's wife leaves her husband, allowing for a lost bond to be rediscovered between Ted and his son, Billy. But a heated custody battle ensues over the divorced couple's son, deepening the wounds left by the separation. Director: Robert Benton An old Jewish woman and her African-American chauffeur in the American South have a relationship that grows and improves over the years. Director: Bruce Beresford The story of King George VI of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, his impromptu ascension to the throne and the speech therapist who helped the unsure monarch become worthy of it.

Director: Tom Hooper Los Angeles citizens with vastly separate lives collide in interweaving stories of race, loss and redemption. Director: Paul Haggis Murderesses Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart find themselves on death row together and fight for the fame that will keep them from the gallows in 1920s Chicago. Director: Rob Marshall The story of the final Emperor of China. Director: Bernardo Bertolucci Acting under the cover of a Hollywood producer scouting a location for a science fiction film, a CIA agent launches a dangerous operation to rescue six Americans in Tehran during the U.S. hostage crisis in Iran in 1980. Director: Ben Affleck Edit Storyline Charles Sanford "Charlie" Babbit is a self-centered Los Angeles-based automobile dealer/hustler/bookie who is at war with his own life. Charlie, as a young teenager, used his father's 1949 Buick convertible without permission and as a result, he went to jail for two days on account that his father reported it stolen.

It is then that Charlie learns that his estranged father died and left him from his last will and testament a huge bed of roses and the car while the remainder will of $3 Million goes into a trust fund to be distributed to someone. Charlie seemed pretty angry by this and decides to look into this matter. It seems as if that "someone" is Raymond, Charlie's unknown brother, an autistic savant who lives in a world of his own, resides at the Walbrook Institute. Charlie then kidnaps Raymond and decides to take him on a lust for life trip to the west coast as a threat to get the $3 Million inheritance. Raymond's acts and nagging, including repeated talks of "Abbott & Costello",... Written by Christopher Howell (Ckhowell75360@aol.com) Did You Know? Trivia One of the comments written on a preview card that amused Barry Levinson during the film's initial previews was "I was hoping the little guy would snap out of it". See more » Goofs The scene when Ray gets out of the car on the interstate the posted interstate sign says West 275 (odd number). This is incorrect.

The Interstate System is based on a grid, with east-west routes bearing even numbers and north-south routes bearing odd numbers. Therefore the sign should've had an even number going west. See more » Quotes [first lines] Charlie : [on telephone] Now it's five and a half weeks and I'm still sitting on four Lamborghinis that can't meet spot emissions standards. Now, how many times you wash out with EPA? Lenny : [on a separate line] Uh, yes sir, they're finally, uh, clearing EPA; uh, just one or two more days. Charlie : Three times? You're really on a roll here, my friend; four cars, three times each - that's zip for twelve. What are you, a... mechanic, or a NASA engineer? Now listen, now, I told you I've never dealt with these ... See more » Crazy Credits Throughout the movie, Raymond is taking pictures. The pictures that he takes are shown as the background for the credits. See more » Connections How accurate is Dustin Hoffman's performance in Rain Man? - Quora Quora How accurate is Dustin Hoffman's performance in Rain Man? Does his character portray symptoms of autism one might see in the real world?

Answer Wiki 9 Answers Peter Flom , LD adult. Creator of Author of "Screwed up Somehow but not Stupid: Life with a Learning ... Written Jan 26, 2015 · Upvoted by Quora User, Mother to an autistic child Dustin Hoffman gave a very good performance of one particular autistic person. This was a person who was unusual, even for autistic people (and that's saying something!) When you've seen one autistic person you've seen one autistic person. By the nature of his role, the character he played is one that most people rarely see - he wasn't capable of functioning in the world. In addition, he had savant skills (not all autistic people do). Further, when Rain Man was made (1988) the definition of autism was much more restrictive. I have seen people who act similarly to Rain Man. But you can't look at that guy and say "that's autism!" any more than you can look at Temple Grandin and say "that's autism!" or any kid or adult with autism and say "that's autism!" The same is true for other groups of people.

You wouldn't look at (say) Albert Einstein and say "That's Jewish people!" would you? Written Jan 27, 2015 He was accurate to the autistic savant character that he played. That character however is one person among millions with Autism Spectrum Conditions. As Peter Flom , Chrys Jordan , and Becca Makin note, this is a single type, and a rare and rather extreme type at that, among countless other neurodiversities. Written Jan 27, 2015 · Upvoted by Quora User The problem with performances in famous movies is that they stereotype. Peter Flom , Becca Makin , Chrys Jordan , and Quora User have all discussed the fact that behaviorally speaking, the character is not a universal archetype for autism. I had the chance last week to go to a local meeting for people with autism. The room had everything from computer or anime geeks, to engineers, to artists in it. We were playing Apples to Apples, and it was almost impossible to figure out before someone played whether or not they would take a literal to wildly personal associative meaning for cards, or make a classic literature reference, or what they might pick as the correct card.

I was the person in the corner nervously spouting facts, word definitions, and snark, because when I'm nervous I turn into a font of facts and sarcasm. And unfortunately for me, I am a fact sponge and someone at the table didn't know who Pablo Picasso was and what cubism is. Rain Man was nowhere in that room. I probably got closer to Rain Man than anyone else did out of sheer nervousness. There are some basic qualities we tend to share, although again this is wildly disparate based on the person: a somewhat idiosyncratic or literal interpretation of incoming communication a focus on some subject, approach, idea, or central interest the need for routines or for some systematic approach to daily activities distress at having our routines or approaches broken trouble gauging behaviors appropriate to circumstances or adapting to complex social situations I'm actually leaving stims off the list because so many people were trained out of them and you might not get to see their stims on casual observance. That's pretty much it. So no, Rain Man is not fully accurate for the daily life of people with autism.

975 Views · View Upvotes · Answer requested by Quora User Becca Makin , diagnosed with Asperger's when 22/23 Written Jan 25, 2015 · Upvoted by Quora User, Mother to an autistic child Gods this is so hard to answer. Mostly because I've never managed to make it all the way through the movie Rain Man. I watched it a bit on Netflix and I got to the moment or just past the moment when Dustin threw a massive fit outside of someone's home until finally the person out of fear let him in to watch a TV show he really wanted to see as part of his routine and at that point I was feeling so sick, and near violated just watching this and knowing all the pain and suffering that autistic people have been through because of the general success of this film causing so many misconceptions that I felt I genuinely had to make the decision to either stop watching or I was going to need to start cutting myself. It was so painful for me to try and watch this I was genuinely considering the option of self harm if I was going to continue so I didn't. So with that in mind, I only saw some of Dustin's performance.

I saw his repetitions, I saw the interaction at the institution, I saw the Doctor's appointment to clarify what he had, I saw the time when he dropped and knew how many toothpicks there were. Never the less, I know the tropes. I know and saw the underwear line, the Judge Wapner line, the speech pattern, the head tilt, the obsession with routine. I saw his brother played by Tom Cruise get frustrated and angry at him. How accurate is it? I'd view it as a hit and miss. I've never met nor interacted with an autistic person who has acted in all those ways with all those different symptoms ever. Then again, I haven't met nor interacted with every autistic out there - and nothing is universal. That's actually something that's REALLY important and can never be stressed enough when you watch or discuss ANYTHING to do with autism. Outside of the "we're all human" factor - NOTHING is universal. It's said by some that a great deal of inspiration for Dustin Hoffman's character was drawn from a man known as Kim Peek (who died in 2009), who wasn't autistic but a savant, although this is disputed by the man who wrote the movie.

Some autistics may speak about the same subject over and over again, this is a thing (although from what I've seen a great deal do a variation on a theme and it's not the exact same words in the exact same order and over - We are not Groot). Many love routine (I know I do) as it can make people feel safe and if there is some sort of control over one's own environment (this isn't even all THAT unusual among neurotypicals and allistics - it's merely more emphasized with less ease of variation to just "squeeze something in"). But again - nothing in autism is universal. For all the individual symptoms that Dustin may or may not have portrayed accurately for one autistic out there -it'll be wildly different for another. All I can say with a surety is that he did not portray how autism affects me accurately at all. He does not appear to portray how autism affects the people I know with autism with any great deal of accuracy. The symptoms he had were all specifically cherry-picked and portrayed in such a manner that would move the plot along in a manner that the screenwriter and director wished it to move.

Dustin's character wasn't real, his performance is not applicable to real people and you can't point at him and say "that's autism" like thousands of horribly misguided and ablest people have been doing since the movie came out. Every symptom was contrived and developed to move forward the story. Each frustrating interaction was part of the story where he taught his able-bodied brother a valuable life non-lesson, as these "suddenly-disabled-person-and/or-baby-in-life" stories tend to go, was designed. I wouldn't class it as a "good" movie to watch if you want to understand the different ways that autism affects different autistic people (I would also like to point out that it's a horribly ablest, hateful and harmful representation of autistics) - I wouldn't recommend ANY movie as a good one watch if you want to understand the different ways autism affects different autistic people. I'd advise, you know, talking to and interacting with autistic people more to get to know and see first hand how autism affects them. Nothing is universal for all autistics. There might, in fact, be an autistic out there, way out there in the back of beyond, who acts in a very similar manner to Dustin. There probably isn't.

The statistics and likelihood are against. But there might be. I wouldn't go looking for them however, and I wouldn't make any assumptions that you're ever going to meet an autistic like the character. Ever. You'd be a fair better person if you just got to know them individually and understood that the fact they are individuals trumps their neurology any day. Just pause however, and think before you next watch this movie or ask a question like this: Someone with autism had to stop watching this movie because it was making them seriously consider self-harm and it actually felt like self-harm to continue watching. Do you REALLY want to try and draw comparisons between them and something they find so offensive and painful? Because you know... I'm not the only one with autism who find this movie offensive... or even THAT offensive. But I don't know any that would be offended if you treated us all as unique individuals. 330 Views · View Upvotes · Not for Reproduction · Answer requested by Quora User Quora User, Adult autistic Written Jan 26, 2015 · Upvoted by Quora User, Mother to an autistic child Thanks for the A2A.

Caveat: I am what they used to call "high-functioning," which puts me at the opposite end of the scale as Hoffman's character in terms of severity. The symptoms he portrays (obsessional interests about unusual things such as his need to see the People's Court every day and write down the results, black-and-white thinking as evidenced by his reaction to flying any airline but Qantas, his inability to deal with sudden changes, and his insistence on the same food every day, which evidences a need for routine) used to be called "low-functioning" symptoms, combined with the mythical "autistic savant" thing. His reaction to the smoke alarm going off, for me, is accurate for me if I am already under some stress. His portrayal was of a man who was at the far end of the scale in terms of severity. However, he also based his performance on a man who turned out not to be classically autistic but have other brain problems (Kim Peek). So no, he's not particularly accurate for the common or garden autistic unless they are at the far end of the severity scale as an adult.

263 Views · View Upvotes · Answer requested by Quora User Kim Peek, Inspiration for ‘Rain Man,’ Dies at 58 - The New York Times The New York Times U.S. |Kim Peek, Inspiration for ‘Rain Man,’ Dies at 58 Search Continue reading the main story In 1988, the film “Rain Man,” about an autistic savant played by Dustin Hoffman , shed a humane light on the travails of autism while revealing the extraordinary powers of memory that a small number of otherwise mentally disabled people possess, ostensibly as a side effect of their disability. The film won four Oscars, including best picture, best actor and, for Barry Morrow and Ronald Bass, best original screenplay. But it never would have been made if Mr. Morrow had not had a chance meeting with Kim Peek, who inspired him to write the film. Mr. Peek was not autistic — not all savants are autistic and not all autistics are savants — but he was born with severe brain abnormalities that impaired his physical coordination and made ordinary reasoning difficult. He could not dress himself or brush his teeth without help. He found metaphoric language incomprehensible and conceptualization baffling.

But with an astonishing skill that allowed him to read facing pages of a book at once — one with each eye — he read as many as 12,000 volumes. Even more remarkable, he could remember what he had read. Indeed, Mr. Peek, who died Dec. 19 at home in Salt Lake City, had perhaps the world’s most capacious memory for facts. He was 58. The cause was a heart attack, said his father, Fran Peek. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Almost all documented savants — people with an extraordinary depth of knowledge and the ability to recall it — have been restricted in their expertise to specific fields like mathematics, chess, art or music. But Mr. Peek had a wide range of interests and could instantly answer the most arcane questions on subjects as diverse as history, sports, music, geography and movies. “He was the Mount Everest of memory,” Dr. Darold A. Treffert, an expert on savants who knew Mr. Peek for 20 years, said in an interview. Mr.

Peek had memorized so many Shakespearean plays and musical compositions and was such a stickler for accuracy, his father said, that they had to stop attending performances because he would stand up and correct the actors or the musicians. Photo Kim Peek gained wide recognition for his extraordinary memory. Credit Barton Glasser/Deseret News, via Associated Press “He’d stand up and say: ‘Wait a minute! The trombone is two notes off,’ ” Fran Peek said. Mr. Peek had an uncanny facility with the calendar. “When an interviewer offered that he had been born on March 31, 1956, Peek noted, in less than a second, that it was a Saturday on Easter weekend,” Dr. Treffert and Dr. Daniel D. Christensen wrote about Mr. Peek in Scientific American in 2006. They added: “He knows all the area codes and ZIP codes in the U.S., together with the television stations serving those locales. He learns the maps in the front of phone books and can provide MapQuest-like travel directions within any major U.S. city or between any pair of them.

He can identify hundreds of classical compositions, tell when and where each was composed and first performed, give the name of the composer and many biographical details, and even discuss the formal and tonal components of the music. Most intriguing of all, he appears to be developing a new skill in middle life. Whereas before he could merely talk about music, for the past two years he has been learning to play it.” Mr. Peek, who was dismissed as mentally retarded as a child and later misdiagnosed as autistic, led a sheltered life, with few people outside his family aware of his remarkable gifts. Then, in 1984, he met Mr. Morrow at a meeting of the Association of Retarded Citizens in Arlington, Tex. Mr. Peek’s father was chairman of the group’s communications committee, and Mr. Morrow had helped create two television movies about a retarded man named Bill (played by Mickey Rooney). After Mr. Peek displayed his memory skills in a conversation with him, Mr. Morrow set about concocting a story around someone like Kim Peek. “I was absolutely flabbergasted that such a human being existed,” Mr. Morrow said in a 2006 documentary about Mr.

Peek . Advertisement Continue reading the main story In “Rain Man,” the autistic character, Raymond Babbitt, has been institutionalized since he was very young but is reunited with a cynical younger brother, Charlie (played by Tom Cruise), who had forgotten about his brother’s existence. (The title comes from Raymond’s recollection of the infant Charlie’s name for him.) The two men take a cross-country trip, and fraternal reconciliation ensues. The movie, a critical and box office success, was not based on Mr. Peek’s life, but in preparing for the role, Mr. Hoffman visited with Mr. Peek and incorporated many of his characteristics — a shambling gait, peculiar hand movements and occasional blunt utterances — into the character of Raymond. When Mr. Hoffman won an Oscar for best actor for the performance, he thanked Mr. Peek in his acceptance speech. Mr. Morrow went even further: he gave his own Oscar statuette to Mr. Peek, who carried it with him to public appearances for the next 21 years. In the wake of “Rain Man,” Mr.

Peek became something of a celebrity, emerging from his shell to travel around the country giving demonstrations of his talent and advocating tolerance for the disabled. Fran Peek estimated that some 400,000 people have hugged Mr. Morrow’s statuette. Photo Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise in “Rain Man.” Credit United Artists “We called it the world’s best-loved Oscar,” he said. Laurence Kim Peek was born on Nov. 11, 1951. (He was named for his mother’s favorite actor, Laurence Olivier, and the title character of Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim”; Kipling was his father’s favorite author.) Kim’s head was enlarged, his cerebellum was malformed and, perhaps most crucial, he was missing the corpus callosum, the sheaf of nerve tissue that connects the brain’s hemispheres. It has been theorized that this disruption of normal communication between the brain’s left and right halves resulted in a kind of jury-rigged rewiring. “Perhaps the resulting structures allow the two hemispheres to function, in certain respects, as one giant hemisphere, putting normally separate functions under the same roof, as it were,” Drs.

Treffert and Christensen wrote. “If so, then Peek may owe some of his talents to this particular abnormality.” When Kim was 9 months old, a doctor said that he was so severely retarded that he would never walk or talk and that he should be institutionalized. When Kim was 6, another doctor recommended a lobotomy. By then, however, Kim had read and memorized the first eight volumes of a set of family encyclopedias, his father said. He received part-time tutoring from the age of 7 and completed a high school curriculum by 14. He spent great swaths of time absorbing volumes in the Salt Lake City Public Library. He never used computers, his father said. “How he learned to read, I just don’t know,” Mr. Peek said. Kim Peek’s parents divorced in 1981, and his father cared for him alone until his son’s death. Besides his father, Mr. Peek is survived by his mother, Jeanne Willey Peek Buchi; a brother, Brian; and a sister, Alison, all of Salt Lake City. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “Rain Man” changed Mr. Peek’s life.

In the documentary, he confessed that before the film, he never looked anyone in the face. “Barry influenced me more than any other person,” he said of Mr. Morrow. “He made me ‘Rain Man.’ ” Though his social skills never fully developed, he grew to be outwardly engaging. He enjoyed being among people in his travels and became comfortable as something of a showman. He began developing mental skills he had never had before, like making puns; his coordination slowly improved, to the extent that he could play the piano. He became more self-aware, even displaying a certain social agility. During a presentation Mr. Peek gave at Oxford University in England, after he fielded students’ questions about the Lusitania and about British monarchs, a young woman stood and asked him, “Kim, are you happy?” “I’m happy just to look at you,” Mr. Peek said. A version of this article appears in print on December 27, 2009, on Page A30 of the New York edition with the headline: Kim Peek, Inspiration for ‘Rain Man,’ Dies at 58. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

Question: Dustin Hoffman played a character suffering from Autism in which Film?
Answer: Rain Man