Being Heumanndid not invent its title out of whole cloth. It took its title from the book its subject published in 2020, subtitled “An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist.” Judy Heumann, the “Mother of the Disability Rights Movement,” doubtless had to field riffs on her name throughout her life, and more than earned her right to offer up her own. But, slapped on the screen without that context, it reads as a corny joke, which is director Sian Heder’s new biographical drama in a nutshell. It’s a film made out of an earnest desire to meet its subjects, activists who in 1977 occupied a federal building in San Francisco for 26 days as part of their fight for rights and accessibility, where they are and from their perspective. At the same time, it funnels their stories through the most conventional of storytelling beats, and into a format meant to inform and uplift, to stress the importance of its subject matter while keeping things light with regular bits of comedy and familiar needle drops. What accessibility means to Heder, as a filmmaker who wants to reach the broadest possible audience, and to Heumann and her cohort, who are battling for curb cuts and other changes to allow them to participate in public life, are two very different and sometimes contradictory things.
I didn’t dislike CODA, Heder’s last feature, a perfectly nice film with one genuinely sublime scene that also happens to have been burdened with a Best Picture win during that asterisked COVID awards season. But the way that Heder brings those same instincts for sentimentality to this film, which Heder wrote with Rebekah Taussig, feels more fraught. Early in the movie, Hale Zukas (Andrew Pilkington), an activist who was born with cerebral palsy, refers to Judy (Ruth Madeley) as a “radical crip” for her suggestion that they storm the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. There’s nothing about Being Heumann in terms of style or tone that mirrors that political edge — in fact, in its desire to make its characters likable and relatable, it rounds them into depictions that are downright cutesy. This is a movie that includes a slow-motion scene of its characters traveling through a crowd in wheelchairs to the strains of (sigh) “Judy Is a Punk,” and sends its villain Joseph A. Califano Jr. (Mark Ruffalo) scrambling out a window to avoid the protesters on his lawn like a teenager breaking curfew, and that insists a room full of activists would pause dramatically before all gradually raising their hands when someone asks, “Who’s with me?”
It’s a movie that does everything in its power to avoid alienating its audience, which feels like a disservice to the real people it’s portraying, who insist on being seen as they are and not tucked away out of sight for anyone else’s ease. The one unexpected choice that Heder makes is having the bulk of the film take place during the 1977 sit-in rather than starting with Judy as a child whose parents had to fight for her ability to attend school, and then going through her relationship with activism. The tighter focus allows Being Heumann to devote more attention to the process of collective action and what it takes to apply political pressure and draw attention to your cause, but it also means that the movie has to wedge in exposition as it goes, not always elegantly. Characters like soft-spoken activist Kitty Cone (Madeline Delp) and Black Panther Brad Lomax (Antwan Tolliver) get introductions that bring to mind the “What do you think, George Harrison of the Beatles” line in Walk Hard. But the scenes in which activists figure out how to act as attendants and caregivers to one another are often lovely, as is the temporary society they create there in the hallways of 50 United Nations Plaza, where they race wheelchairs and hold workshops on having sex with disabilities.
Theirs is a not-always-steady coalition of people who use wheelchairs, who have dwarfism, who are deaf, who are blind, and who are allies (played by the likes of Dylan O’Brien and Roberta Colindrez). And there’s a huge relief to the fact that this is also true for the actors playing these parts. Disability has, in film, historically been treated as primo material for a role rather than a fact of life in ways that have sometimes been downright grotesque. Being Heumann doesn’t just serve as a counterpoint to this long tradition. It regards disability as just one aspect of the larger whole that its actors bring to their performances — putting their experiences with moving through the world on screen in addition to their physicality. This is true for Madeley, an English actor who was born with spina bifida, in addition to the other cast members, and it’d be a nice narrative for her to make a big splash in the awards race this year, though I don’t think it’s going to happen. Madeley isn’t bad as Judy, but the character suffers from Heder’s reflex to sanitize and sand off edges. We’re told that Judy can be an asshole (“I’m from Brooklyn,” she counters) more than we’re shown it. Either way, Being Heumann never lets her be the kind of asshole who could make things genuinely uncomfortable, or who’d consider her cause above the wellbeing of her fellow activists when push came to shove. She leans into a pugnaciousness that’s sitcomesque, and while she works to change the world, she doesn’t change herself, which isn’t admirable so much as one-note. The result is a movie that feels like it’s making the kinds of compromises its subjects refused to.
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