If you’ve spent much time watching films from the various festival circuits, you’ll have become familiar with the ‘Sundance Movie’, the sort of eccentric dramedy that is easy to mock and parody but sometimes produces gold. Yet, in the shadow of this has grown an almost equally identifiable recipe: the ‘TIFF Movie’. Always premiering at Toronto, it’s the sort of film that is typically glossier, less quirky, and more likely to be based on a true story than a Sundance Movie, but ultimately aims at the exact same gently funny and not very memorable uplift. It’s a term that could not possibly fit Being Heumann any better, Sian Heder following up her (rather bafflingly) Oscar-winning CODA with the true tale of Judy Heumann and her fierce fight for disability rights in the ‘70s – a very sweet, but also very ordinary historical drama.
As played by British actor and actual wheelchair user Ruth Madeley, Heder and writer Rebekah Taussig do admirable work in not making Heumann too ‘likeable’. She’s a charming protagonist, to be sure, but with enough abrasive and sweary edge to remind you that she was, in the words of one of her close allies, an ‘asshole’ that the movement needed to get anything done. After a brief prologue in 1972, we flash forward to 1977 for the majority of the story, as Judy and her team of disability activists (of varying degrees of political radicalism) push the relatively newly ensconced Carter administration to actually implement promised laws on making public life more accessible to the disabled.
To this end, she stages a sit-in at the Health, Education, and Welfare government building in San Francisco, besieging and then occupying the offices and refusing to come out until the head of HEW in DC, Joseph Califano (Mark Ruffalo) comes to meet them and their demands in person. The initial taking of the building, a nervous yet joyful scramble as ramps are rushed in and protesters of varying disabilities use the strengths they have to help each other, is Being Heumann at its best, a galvanising jolt of energy and purpose that the rest of the film lacks.
From there, we settle into much more familiar ‘true story’ territory, never worse than serviceable in script or direction but also never really better than decent. For every bit of welcome boundary-pushing – sharp analyses of intersectionalism and its limitations in protest movements, the acknowledgement that disabled doesn’t mean asexual, etc – there’s at least 10 moments of ‘seen it all before’.
Heder’s choice to have all the activists played by actually disabled actors is great, though. Any other option, while allowing you to go starrier (Apple TV provided the budget for a mostly-streaming, limited-cinematic release, so making the money back is less of a concern), would have made their big communal debate and celebration scenes into something affected at best and embarrassing at worst. Instead, they’re honest and lively and give a spotlight to actors who are too rarely afforded it (for one, it was great to see Fargo’s Russell Harvard again as an energetic Deaf activist).
For the able-bodied cast, it’s touching (and a little amusing) to see Heder assemble a small brigade of Hollywood’s wokest blokes (Ruffalo, of course, but also Dylan O’Brien as the sympathetic and increasingly radicalised local news reporter Evan White and Rob Delaney as passionate ally Congressman George Miller). You couldn’t say the roles are electrifyingly written or acted, but the shared political priorities (Taussig’s script is steadfast in showcasing not just the disability activists but also the aid offered by the Black Panther Party) across cast and crew do lend an authenticity that you can often *feel* in the final product.
As with many ‘TIFF Movies’ that are unlikely to light the world on fire, Being Heumann is still a nice time at the cinema. It’s bouncy and sunny and means very well, but never really gathers the oomph to be something you’re going to remember much past the end of the year. Maybe the story of American protest’s longest ever sit-in, and the ground it laid as a precursor to the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (one of the most significant legislative civil rights victories *ever* won), deserved a more memorably radical telling, but maybe there’s room for something more plainly heartwarming too.
