Rain Man (1988) Review
8/10
A car importer in Los Angeles is in trouble with the customs office and owes money he doesn’t have. His estranged father dies and leaves him a car and some rose bushes. Three million dollars goes to a brother he didn’t know existed, who lives in an institution in Cincinnati.
The 8 is for a film that does the hard version of a redemption story. Charlie takes Raymond out of the institution to extort a settlement, and he’s doing that for most of the running time, and the film doesn’t soften what it is. What holds it back is a certain neatness in the last act. Vegas arrives, the counting works, the money is won, and a picture that had been unusually honest about the relationship briefly becomes a caper.
Rain Man is a better movie than its plot summary makes it sound. Cruise is uncomfortable in the best way, playing a man I’d cross the street to avoid, and the film makes me wait a long time before it lets me like him. The Vegas stretch is the only part where I feel the studio leaning on the story.
It Is Cruise’s Film
Hoffman won Best Actor and the performance is the one people quote, and the picture wouldn’t function for five minutes without Cruise, because he’s the one who has to change while somebody who can’t change is standing next to him. Charlie at the start is unpleasant. He’s manipulative on the phone, dishonest with his customers, cold to his girlfriend and openly contemptuous of his brother. The film doesn’t hint at a good man underneath. What Cruise does is let the alteration happen in small increments with no scene announcing it. There’s no moment where he decides to love his brother. There’s a moment where he stops correcting him, and then a moment where he starts protecting him from other people.
The airport scene is the turn and it’s played as irritation instead of as a breakthrough. Raymond won’t fly, recites crash statistics, and Charlie gives in and drives. That’s the first time in the film he’s accommodated anybody.
The pay phone scene later is the same move at a larger scale. He’s shouting at his business collapsing on one line while his brother stands beside him needing something trivial, and the film lets both problems be real at once without ranking them. That’s far harder to write than a clean choice between the two, and it’s the scene that sold me on Cruise.
A redemption arc should have no scene in which the character decides to be redeemed. Decisions are announcements, and readers distrust announcements. The change should be visible in what the character stops doing well before it appears in what he starts doing.
Give the unpleasant version real time. The audience needs to have disliked him properly. That means resisting the early moment of warmth that makes him bearable. The other requirement is that the object of the change can’t reciprocate. Raymond doesn’t love him back in any legible way, so nothing Charlie does is rewarded. That’s what makes the alteration credible.
Raymond Does Not Arc
The film’s most disciplined decision is that Raymond ends where he begins. He doesn’t learn, doesn’t open up, and doesn’t have a breakthrough in the third act.
He’s autistic with a savant capacity for numbers, he’s a fixed schedule, specific foods, a television program he can’t miss, and a distress response to being touched, and all of it is the same in the last scene as in the first.
Hoffman spent a year with families and clinicians and the performance is built from specific observed behaviors instead of from a general idea. The repetitions are consistent, the tics don’t intensify for effect, and he never once plays a moment of connection the character can’t have.
The film has been faulted since for creating a public image of autism that flattened into a stereotype, and that criticism is fair as a description of what followed. It’s less fair to the film, which is careful, and which is about a brother who doesn’t understand what he’s looking at.
I admire Hoffman’s restraint more than the famous tics. He never cheats Raymond toward a warm moment the character couldn’t have, and that discipline is what lets every small change in Cruise register.
The Journey Is a Hostage Situation
Charlie removes Raymond from the institution without permission to force a negotiation over the trust, and the film is entirely clear that this is what’s happening.
Almost every road film about two people forced together softens the compulsion within twenty minutes. This one keeps it. Charlie is committing something close to an abduction for six days and the money is his motive until very near the end.
That honesty is why the ending works. When he refuses the settlement in the doctor’s office, it means something, because the film has spent two hours establishing exactly how much he needs it. The negotiation scene is the best writing in the picture. The doctor offers the money, Charlie realizes he has to decide in front of his brother, and the refusal is delivered without a speech.
That refusal is the moment I’d rate the whole film on. A man turns down the money he’s spent two hours chasing, says almost nothing, and it moves me more than any jackpot in Vegas.
Valeria Golino gets the one outside perspective and the film uses her sparingly. Susanna leaves partway through because she’s correctly identified what Charlie is doing, and returns when it’s stopped being true. That makes her the audience’s position given a body.
A protagonist with a corrupt motive should keep it for most of the book. The reader should be unsure whether he’ll take the money when it’s offered.
That uncertainty drives the story and most writers spend it early. If the reader knows by page fifty that he’s a good man underneath, the final choice is a formality.
Establish the size of the temptation precisely. Three million dollars against a business collapsing in weeks is a real amount against a real deadline, and vagueness here costs you the ending.
Four Directors Passed
The project went through Steven Spielberg, Martin Brest and Sydney Pollack among others, and the script was rewritten repeatedly over several years before Barry Levinson took it. What that history produced is a film with almost no directorial signature, and here that’s a strength. Levinson shoots it plainly, holds on faces, and gets out of the way of two actors doing something difficult. The one flourish is the highway photography, and John Seale shoots the American interstate as flat, hot and enormous, with the Buick as a small object crossing it. The film takes a week of real time and the geography reflects it.
The car means more than it seems. It’s the father’s 1949 Buick, the object Charlie was never allowed to drive as a teenager and the reason he left home, and the two brothers cross the country in the thing the whole estrangement was about. Nobody in the film remarks on it. It took four Academy Awards including Picture, Director, Actor and Screenplay, and a little over three hundred and fifty million dollars worldwide, which for a two-hander about brothers driving wasn’t a result anybody predicted. The screenplay credit went to Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow, and Morrow had built the original character after meeting a man with an extraordinary memory who wasn’t autistic. The composite that resulted is the source of both the film’s specificity and the confusion that followed it.
The Ending Refuses the Reunion
Raymond goes back to the institution. Charlie doesn’t win custody, doesn’t bring him home, and doesn’t get a scene where his brother says something that proves a connection. What he gets is a promise to visit in two weeks and a moment at a train where Raymond puts his head against his brother’s, briefly. That’s the only physical contact in the film he’s initiated. The Rain Man revelation sits underneath all of it. Charlie had an imaginary friend as a small child who sang to him, and works out on the road that the friend was his brother, removed from the house after an accident with hot water that the family never explained to him.
That’s exactly the right size, and it’s the image that wrecks me. A larger gesture would be false to everything the picture has established about Raymond, and a smaller one would leave the audience with nothing. A head resting against a brother’s head for a second is worth more to me than any reunion scene the studio could have bought.
The last shot is a train leaving and a man watching it, and the film declines to tell us whether Charlie’s business survives or whether the visits continue. What changed is what he’s prepared to do. That’s the only thing the story ever claimed to be about.
Size your final gesture to the character instead of to the audience’s appetite. Readers will accept something tiny if it’s the largest thing that person could do, and the test is whether the same gesture would be unremarkable coming from anybody else in the book.
Refusing the reunion is usually stronger. A story that ends with everybody together has resolved the situation, and a story that ends with somebody changed has resolved the character.
Leave the practical outcome open. Whether the business survives is a plot question, and answering it invites the reader to evaluate the ending on the wrong axis.
Should you watch Rain Man?
Yes, and watch Cruise instead of Hoffman. The performance that won the award is the one that can’t change, and the film works because the man standing next to him does, in increments, without ever announcing it. It’s an 8 because the Vegas detour turns an honest story into a caper for a stretch, and I’d have trimmed it hard. Everything around that detour is about as good as a two-hander about brothers gets.
