Best Picture: #61
Original Release Date: December 16, 1988
Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 13 minutes
Director: Berry Levinson
Quick Impressions:
“I love this movie,” I told my daughter in excitement as we prepared to watch Rain Man. Then I realized I had only seen it once (as a new release on home video when I was in fifth grade). That realization shocked me. I felt like Homer Simpson talking about Octopussy. (“Man, I must have seen that movie…twice!”) If I loved Rain Man so much, why didn’t I ever watch it again?
What I did instead was start learning more about autism. Even stranger than the fact that I had never watched Rain Man again (until now) is the realization that before I watched it the first time, I had never heard of autism or autistic savants (or savant syndrome without autism or anything like that at all). Now granted, I was ten years old, but I remember a serious uptick in national interest in autism accompanying the release of this film. For my entire childhood, people hadn’t discussed the topic much, and then suddenly autism was everywhere, all over TV, in magazine articles, in books.
Even The Babysitters Club had a volume about autism, Kristy and the Secret of Susan. I was only a casual Babysitters Club reader, but I liked that one, about a young piano prodigy “locked inside her own secret world.” Practicing my piano (my most loathed activity) became marginally more endurable when I imagined I was a savant “locked inside her own secret world.” That borderline fetishization of autism seems uncomfortable to me now. My own behavior was questionable, and it was being influenced by the media which was presenting autism as mysterious, romantic, and alluring. (It was the same way everybody seemed to present Australia as mysterious, romantic, and alluring after Crocodile Dundee.) I remember watching a news show (I think 60 Minutes) about several talented autistic savants, including a man who was the partial inspiration for Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man. I was amazed by their remarkable giftedness, their genius at math or music. (My own piano playing, however, did not improve. I had much better luck roleplaying my favorite Sweet Valley Twins book, The New Girl, in which Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield tell someone they have an identical triplet named Jennifer and take turns pretending to be her as a mean-spirited prank that eventually teaches them not to play mean-spirited pranks.) (As a kid, I often pretended to be my own twin, so the idea that real, distinct twins could pretend to be the same additional fake person took that game to a higher level than I could ever dream of as a lonely singleton!)
Today, I have countless friends and relatives who are on the spectrum. (I’m not sure that neurotypical is the perfect word to describe me either, to be honest.) I now encounter material about autism practically every day (possibly because some of those friends and relatives on the spectrum share articles about it on social media). The world in general seems very aware of autism now, though it is still far too often viewed as a disorder rather than a difference.
But even as a child, I enjoyed thinking about cognition, and seeing Rain Man presented ten-year-old me with new insight into how the human brain can work. I thought Dustin Hoffman’s Oscar winning performance was brilliant, and I found Raymond fascinating, intriguing, and so heart-breaking in that bathtub scene.
Now if I’m being fully honest, there may be an obvious reason why I didn’t seek out opportunities to watch Rain Man again and again. I’m ashamed to admit this (because now that I’ve appeared on Jeopardy! and experienced public scrutiny, it strikes me as a particularly awful thing).
As a child, my grandma’s marked antipathies for certain actors often left me bemused. She had it in for all sorts of people she had never met and avoided the movies of those she despised unless someone forced her to watch them. And for some reason, she persisted in believing that because she hated Marilyn Monroe (a favorite of mine at that age), that meant that I hated Elizabeth Taylor (a favorite of hers). I can’t tell you how many times I protested, “I do not have anything at all against Elizabeth Taylor, and I never have. Why would I hate Elizabeth Taylor?” She would argue, “She’s a beautiful woman.” And I would say, “Yes, I agree.” She would persist, “She’s a very good actress. She’s made some great movies.” And I would say, “Yes, that’s true.” She would say, “You don’t have to humor me. I know how you feel.” It was very frustrating. Other celebrities Grandma had it in for included Katharine Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, Joan Crawford, everybody else. When she didn’t like them, she did not like them. But I liked almost everybody.
Except Tom Cruise.
As I said, I never understood the strong feelings my grandma had about actors…until I realized, “Wow, I can’t stand Tom Cruise.” It was such a weird, uncomfortable realization. It baffled and disturbed me. When friends at school found out I liked Rain Man, they started talking about how cute Tom Cruise was, and I was so perplexed. I said, “You mean the boring guy?” (To me, Dustin Hoffman was the obvious draw of Rain Man. I could see no appeal in Cruise whatsoever.) “You don’t think he’s cute?” they would ask in shock (equally shocked with every denial).
No, I didn’t think he was cute, but it was something more than that. I had pronounced, negative feelings towards him that I did not understand. This continued for about fifteen years. At one point, a friend of mine in high school suggested, “Maybe you secretly love him,” and I was like, “Maybe not.” (Good explanation, I agree. Sadly, it was not true.) Why did I dislike him so much? (I still don’t know!) I just did.
My bizarre antipathy for Cruise became a running joke with my friends and family, and I played it up for humor, but as a teenager, it bothered me. It seemed like every single day, Tom Cruise was doing nothing but rescuing people from drowning on sinking yachts. (Surely this happened only once, and I just encountered the story multiple times from different sources.) The point is, all evidence pointed to Cruise being heroic, personable, and philanthropic, but I had such a bad feeling about him that I just couldn’t shake. I remember ranting to my mother, “Why is it that whenever he wants an Academy Award, he announces that he’s acting this time? Shouldn’t he be acting every time?” (as if it’s a crime to campaign for an Oscar, and he writes all his press releases himself!).
The fact is, I had no legitimate complaints about poor Tom Cruise whatsoever, just an intense (yet baseless) aversion to him that tormented me endlessly. (To be clear, I never wished him harm, and I still watched his movies, maybe even more willingly than I would have done otherwise.) Then suddenly (for a brief time), the whole world seemed to turn on Tom Cruise. It was like a switch flipped, and everybody hated him. When that happened, I didn’t have the heart to hate him anymore. So I stopped. Mentioning it. (And eventually, the intensity of the feeling faded). I’m sure if I met him in person, I would like him (though if he happened to read this, he might not care much for me). I’ve heard he’s personable and charming. I’m sure that’s true.
What’s funny is, as I watched Rain Man again with my daughter, I had quite an epiphany. “Wait a minute!” I thought. “Maybe I just disliked Tom Cruise because his character in this movie is a hostile jerk for such a long time.” Perhaps I wasted decades driving myself crazy, considering my antipathy for Tom Cruise an unknowable, complex mystery, when all along I just find Charlie Babbitt off-puttingly rude! (It’s possible. Watching Fatal Attraction when I was nine made me suspicious of Glenn Close for like three years until I started reading about Borderline Personality Disorder.)
What’s even funnier is that on this watch of the movie, I slowly began to believe that Tom Cruise is playing the more interesting character. Then as the film ended, my daughter revealed that she shared this opinion. Yes, Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond is well played and highly sympathetic, but the character who really got our attention is Charlie! My first watch of Rain Man led me to seek out more information about autism, but my second watch made me think much more about Charlie Babbitt and his frustrating inability to communicate!
The Good:
The Babbitt brothers are so similar. Both Raymond and Charlie have big hearts and communication styles that cause social difficulties for them. I really wish we had gotten to meet their father before he died. (I would love to know if he said, “definitely” all the time. Repeating the word is a verbal tic Raymond has, but Charlie does it, too, before he even knows Raymond exists. I feel like they must have gotten that from the same place.)
At one point, my daughter observed, “I feel like Charlie is the harder one to get along with.” She pointed out, “Ray has to go to Kmart, but he has to go to LA.”
It is pretty amusing (for the audience) that Charlie castigates Ray for repeating his desire to go to Kmart, so that he can assert his own desire to go to Los Angeles. (From Charlie’s point of view, Ray does not actually need to cause a delay by going to Kmart, but from Ray’s point of view, Charlie does not need to delay his opportunity to get new underwear from Kmart by insisting they drive to LA so quickly. From anyone’s point of view, does Charlie really need to kidnap his brother and force him to go to Los Angeles? Is taking that action justified by sound reasoning? Ray does need underwear.)
Late in the film, Raymond is asked to choose between two options. Does he want to stay with his brother or go back to the institution where he’s lived most of his life. He answers, “Yeah, go back to Walbrook, stay with Charlie Babbit.” Someone not listening carefully would assume he’s incapable of giving a discerning answer because he’s conflating contradictory options. (I thought, “Hmm. That’s how I make decisions, too.”) But that is what Raymond wants. He wants to go back to Walbrook, where he is safe, and he wants to stay with his brother because he loves him.
Charlie also thinks this way, a way that seems contradictory on the surface. He spends almost the entirety of the movie yelling at people to shut up because he wants to communicate with them. It’s very self-defeating behavior. Charlie is consistently, aggressively rude. He talks all the time, in a hostile, one-sided way. He never listens to anyone. But what he is actually seeking is connection. (In fact, I suspect that what he wants most are answers from his father. But he’ll never get them because he chose to stop interacting with his father. And now his father has died.)
From the very beginning of the movie, Charlie is always yelling at people (often on the phone), telling those around him to be quiet, persistently overtalking the other person on the phone. He spends so much of this movie yelling into telephone receivers, refusing to hear the person on the other end, interrupting, overtalking. No matter where he goes—all across the nation, in hotels, phone booths, diners, some random country farmhouse full of occupants he doesn’t know—Charlie is always yelling into the phone. (In that farmhouse scene, he’s so frustrated with Raymond for wanting to watch The People’s Court. He concocts a ridiculous scheme to gain access to a random family’s TV. When that doesn’t work, he threatens that his brother will create a scene unless they let them use the TV. He makes a point of telling Ray again and again how unreasonable he’s being, needing to watch the TV, and then as soon as they get inside, Charlie’s yelling into the family’s phone!)
At one point, when they’re in a phone booth, I said to my daughter, “He cracks me up! He’s just on the phone yelling, ‘Shut up!’ He calls someone, then instead of saying, ‘Hello,’ he just immediately yells, ‘Shut up!’” That’s Charlie’s whole interaction style.
Tellingly, the one person in his life is his girlfriend, Susanna, who is accommodatingly Italian. My daughter was somewhat shocked to discover that they’ve been dating for a year given the way he treats her. He is constantly ranting in her presence, then turning silent when she wants to have a conversation with him, acting as if she’s crazy to want to talk to him when he just wants to yell into the void while she’s near.
“I’ll bet it helps that English isn’t her first language,” my daughter said. (And then later we made similar observations about Charlie’s relationship with Raymond. I said, “It’s like when you’re in a foreign country and people graciously assume there are cultural differences, not knowing you’re actually just weird.” Just a hypothetical example. Seriously, though, Charlie needs just as much accommodation as Raymond does, if not more.)
We also joked non-stop about how Charlie always makes Susanna wait in the car. He does it so often that it’s impossible not to laugh. (At one point, even she must comment on all the car waiting, demanding, “Why do I have to take the car, and go down there, and wait for you at the gate?” My daughter yelled encouragingly, “Yeah, Susanna!” I mean, that’s early in the movie, and she’s already waited in the car like 800 times. Later when she shows up in Las Vegas after a period of estrangement, Charlie asks in shock, “What are you doing here?” I answered for her, “I had nowhere to sit, so I had to come find the car.” We died laughing.)
Susanna first waits in the car during Charlie’s father’s funeral. (Unless she’s waiting for him the very first time they get in the car together, which is possible.) Baffled, I asked my daughter, “Why is she waiting in the car?”
“He doesn’t like her that much,” she joked. But she was basing that on the way she would treat somebody she liked. Actually, Charlie does like Susanna quite a bit. After all, he trusts her to wait in his car. All alone. As we soon learn about Charlie, his father didn’t even let him touch his car. (But he did let Raymond drive it in the driveway, slowly and carefully. As the movie goes on, we see that being trusted with a car means a lot to the Babbitt brothers.)
A great joy of the movie is watching Charlie and Raymond learn to communicate together. Charlie slowly realizes that he must make effort to communicate with Raymond, and that helps to teach him that he must make effort to communicate with everyone. (I don’t see any real evidence that he’s completely learned this second lesson by the end of the movie, but the audience can certainly see the point and appreciate the massive change in Charlie. Maybe he doesn’t make the biggest leap and start listening to everyone, but in the beginning all he did was yell at people, so there’s been marked improvement.)
My daughter put this well. “Charlie finally learns to listen to people when he has to listen to someone.” She added, “Charlie may not be able to give Raymond everything he needs, but he learns how to care for him, and I think that counts for something.” Charlie has to listen to understand Raymond. And because he does start listening, he knows that when Ray calls him “my main man” and spells out his name letter-by-letter, what he’s really saying is, “I love you.” (Raymond also loves his trusted attendant V-E-R-N, and, of course, D-A-D.)
My daughter raised another point that’s crucial to keep in mind. We’re not catching the Babbitt brothers on an average day. Both Charlie and Raymond are actively under duress the entire time. Charlie is facing impending financial ruin and grieving for the loss of his father. Raymond is being kidnapped, taken away from every safe thing he knows, and also grieving for the loss of his father.
For a while, Charlie’s behavior is so aggressively obnoxious that I think it’s easy to forget about his grief (though Susanna and the doctor at Walbrook certainly bear it in mind). And because of Raymond’s autism (a more surprising thing in 1988) it’s very easy to forget that he is also mourning the loss of his father. I was more dazzled by Cruise’s character this time around, but that’s because I already take it as a given that Hoffman’s performance is so impressive. In 1988, most people did not know anything about autism. We were coming out of an era in which people with autism often did not get mainstream education. It was a thing that wasn’t seen or understood. Many people equated a difference in cognitive function with lack of cognitive function. Hoffman lets us see Raymond’s personality, and he plays him as a very consistent, complex character. It’s a tremendous performance, and given the era, its nuances are particularly impressive. What’s great is that we not only get a look at how Raymond’s autism makes him different, but that we also see how Raymond is grieving for his father, the same as anyone else would. Even though the autism is particularly conspicuous (because in 1988, seeing a character with autism is unusual), we can also see the grief for the father, the love for the brother. Hoffman gives us such insight into Raymond and makes it all look perfectly natural.
My daughter kept noticing how much some of Raymond’s behaviors reminded her of her little brother—except for his compulsive Jeopardy! watching. ‘Course that reminded her of me, definitely me.
Best Scene:
As a child, the hot bath water scene made the biggest impression on me. You watch that and start crying, thinking, “No wonder this movie won all those Oscars!”
But another crucial scene (for understanding the entire film) is the one in which Charlie finally talks to Susanna, telling her the story of all the drama over his father’s car. (Now granted, he is still basically just ranting in her general direction. He’s not having a true conversation. But he is sharing something that is deeply personal and hugely emotional for him. And he has found someone who will go out of her way to listen to him, so this is a meaningful exchange despite Charlie’s deficiencies as a conversationalist.)
The section of the film set in the casino is pretty gripping, too. I find it interesting that Charlie begins to open up emotionally and see the true value of his brother only after he acquires the money he needs to keep his life from totally falling apart.
Best Scene Visually:
Were she able, my mother would attest to the fact that I loved the toothpick scene in the diner as a child. While she was happy I enjoyed the movie, she was less thrilled when I started dumping toothpicks all over the kitchen floor to see if I could count them. (In case you’re wondering, practice will not enable you to do this, but it will make a big mess and waste all the toothpicks.) I still like the scene. I didn’t even realize until this viewing that Bonnie Hunt plays the waitress in the diner.
The card counting in the casino also fascinated me (and irritated my mother less because while I wasn’t very good at counting cards either, my attempts made much less of a mess than I did with the toothpicks).
Best Action Sequence:
On this watch, I absolutely loved the moment when Raymond wanders into Charlie’s room while he and Susanna are in bed together at their first hotel.
This reminds me of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138. As I attempt to explain this, I realize it looks like I’m going off on a bit of a tangent here, but I promise I have a point. In college, I did a semester-long project on Shakespeare’s Sonnets and studied 138 in particular. Then when I taught a poetry class at UT, I also used Sonnet 138. So I think of it a lot. I wasn’t just watching Rain Man, observing pretentiously out of nowhere, “Ah how like Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138 Tom Cruise is during the sex scene!” (It seems like a strange association, but I promise it makes so much sense!)
Sonnet 138 begins, “When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her, though I know she lies, / that she might think me some untutored youth, / Unlearnéd in the world’s false subtleties.” (I’m now wishing I could include the full text and give a close reading of the whole thing in order to make my point, but that feels excessive here.) The sonnet concludes, “Therefore I lie with her and she with me, /And in our faults by lies we flattered be.” I could write pages about this, but what’s most important to understand is the pun on “lie.” These two lovers are lying to each other while lying together (i.e. having sex). She’s telling him that she’s faithful. He’s pretending to believe her so that he can believe she thinks he’s young enough to be so naïve. But the thing is, this couple never lies together without lying together. Even when they are physically intimate, there’s a fundamental disconnect between them. They are as together as they can be, and yet they’re worlds apart. Even when they are joined together, the only true exchange they have is a mutual desire to deceive each other.
Shakespeare wrote in the Early Modern era, but you can see what’s going on in this sonnet as a precursor to the concerns of later modernity when literature is crawling with the idea that true communication is impossible, being misunderstood is inevitable, there’s no true human connection, what’s if there’s no point to anything???? (Think about J. Alfred Prufrock wandering around that party inside his own head.)
So in this scene in Rain Man, Charlie and Susanna are having sex, but Charlie still has so much difficulty communicating and connecting.
“Look!” I said to my daughter. “Charlie and Susanna are having sex, and yet Raymond is the one listening to Susanna, and Susanna is listening to Raymond. They’re both aware of each other in the room. Charlie never ever listens!”
(A moment later, Susanna says, “You don’t listen to me,” and Charlie replies, “What are you talking about?”)
The way this scene plays out is so telling. Charlie is lost in himself. He could not be physically closer to Susanna at this moment, and yet she and Raymond are communicating more effectively (each aware of the other) than Charlie and Susanna. (Now, Charlie and Susanna aren’t lying to each other like the couple in the sonnet. I’m just reminded of the sonnet because even when Charlie and Susanna are physically as intimate as possible, they are still not as emotionally intimate as you would expect, because he has such difficulty listening to and being aware of others.)
Visually, I also like the part when Raymond gets to drive around the fountain.
The Negatives:
As I’ve said, when I watched this movie as a child, being an autistic savant looked so appealing to me. I do think at the time, autism was presented in kind of an exploitative way. I mean, instead of ignoring, fearing, or underestimating people with autism (all bad things), we were suddenly being told to admire the mystique of the people with autism and to watch them do amazing tricks (less bad, but still kind of weird). I don’t know that Rain Man itself does this, though. I think it’s more the other media that accompanied the release and success of the film. Dustin Hoffman gives an excellent, nuanced, sensitive performance and lets us see the heart of Raymond, despite his differences. But most of the talk about Rain Man at the time of its release (that I remember) stressed Raymond’s autism and how it made him so weird and cool (almost magical). It’s staggering to watch now and see how strangely people talk about and react to autism in this movie. Since it was made in 1988, that’s not exactly a problem with the film, just a reflection of the time.
The only other big problem with the film is that Charlie Babbitt turns out to be such a dynamic character that he spends most of the movie being very, very, very hard to like. Raymond actually communicates much better than Charlie does. Charlie is angry. He’s impatient. He’s inconsiderate. He’s always yelling at everyone, always talking, never listening. Meanwhile, his extremely patient, caring girlfriend spends half her life sitting alone in his car. At one point, my daughter exclaimed, “Couldn’t they make the main character more of a good person? Why did they make him so awful?”
I replied, “Because he’s going to change.” But he sure takes his sweet time about it. Now I will grant you that the change that eventually comes over him is extremely satisfying. In fact, at the end of the movie, I started thinking, “Tom Cruise is actually very good in this scene.” (So maybe his performance in this movie isn’t the reason I spent so many years disliking him, after all. I have no idea what my problem is. Maybe one day someone will make a movie about me so I can figure it out and watch myself change.)
There’s one more tiny little thing. How in the world did Charlie ever manage to kidnap his brother without more repercussions? I realize the doctor is a family friend who’s trying to be lenient, but I’m surprised he lets things go as far as they do. What if Charlie didn’t have a change of heart? (He waits until the last half-hour of the movie to have most of his major breakthroughs. A lot could have gone wrong for Raymond before Charlie turned that corner!)
Overall:
I loved Rain Man the first time, and I still find it highly watchable and (eventually) emotionally satisfying. Dustin Hoffman gives an exceptional performance, introducing many people in his original audience to autism, and then helping us to see (past any differences) and to understand Raymond as a person. And on a second viewing, Tom Cruise’s Charlie Babbitt kind of stole the movie for me. He never listens. He’s always talking. Still, he learns to love his brother. Maybe next time, I won’t wait another thirty years to watch Rain Man again.