Rain Man (1988) Review

A car importer in Los Angeles is in trouble with the customs office and owes money he does not have. His estranged father dies and leaves him a car and some rose bushes. Three million dollars goes to a brother he did not 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 is doing that for most of the running time, and the film does not 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.

It Is Cruise’s Film

Hoffman won Best Actor and the performance is the one people quote, and the picture would not function for five minutes without Cruise, because he is the one who has to change while somebody who cannot change is standing next to him.

Charlie at the start is genuinely unpleasant. He is manipulative on the phone, dishonest with his customers, cold to his girlfriend and openly contemptuous of his brother. The film does not hint at a good man underneath.

What Cruise does is let the alteration happen in small increments with no scene announcing it. There is no moment where he decides to love his brother. There is 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 is played as irritation instead of as a breakthrough. Raymond will not fly, recites crash statistics, and Charlie gives in and drives, which is the first time in the film he has accommodated anybody.

The pay phone scene later is the same move at a larger scale. He is 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, which is a considerably harder thing to write than a straight choice between the two of them would ever have been to write or to stage.

Raymond Does Not Arc

The film’s most disciplined decision is that Raymond ends where he begins. He does not learn, does not open up, and does not have a breakthrough in the third act.

He is autistic with a savant capacity for numbers, he has a fixed schedule, specific foods, a television program he cannot 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 behaviours instead of from a general idea. The repetitions are consistent, the tics do not intensify for effect, and he never once plays a moment of connection the character cannot 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 is less fair to the film, which is careful, and which is about a brother who does not understand what he is looking at.

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 is 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.

Valeria Golino gets the one outside perspective and the film uses her sparingly. Susanna leaves partway through because she has correctly identified what Charlie is doing, and returns when it has stopped being true, which makes her the audience’s position given a body.

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 is 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 matters more than it looks. It is 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 was not 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 was not 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 does not win custody, does not bring him home, and does not 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, which is the only physical contact in the film he has 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 is exactly the right size. A larger gesture would be false to everything the picture has established about the character, and a smaller one would leave the audience with nothing.

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 is prepared to do, which is the only thing the story ever claimed to be about.

Should you watch Rain Man?

Yes, and watch Cruise instead of Hoffman. The performance that won the award is the one that cannot change, and the film works because the man standing next to him does, in increments, without ever announcing it.

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