My Left Foot (1989)
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My Left Foot Movie Review
My Left Foot is a 1989 biographical film directed by Jim Sheridan and starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Brenda Fricker. It’s a solid, but standard Oscar nominee.
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“All is nothing,
therefore nothing must end“
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Christy Brown is a man with cerebral palsy born into a working-class Irish family. Though he is a spastic quadriplegic and essentially paralyzed, a miraculous event occurs when, at the age of 5, he demonstrates control of his left foot by using chalk to scrawl a word on the floor. With the help of his mother, Christy overcomes his disability to become a painter, poet and author.
Yes, this is one of those inspirational biopics meant to inspire the viewer to an oblivion. It does succeed in that, there is no doubt about it, but in the process of doing it, it becomes rather typical and predictable.
Now, the movie itself is fairly well crafted and pretty engaging for the most part. It’s well-made across the board, and it features an inspirational ending, and some hard-hitting sequences here and there. But, for me it wasn’t enough, and I find it hugely overrated as it’s just solid, and never really great to begin with.
The problem with these kinds of biopics is that they are all so similar to each other, and so damn predictable. Yes, you get inspired for sure. But you also get bored at times, and I found the entire narrative to it, especially the structure beyond obvious and standard.
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Daniel Day-Lewis is excellent in the main role of Christy Brown. He’s believable, very strong and I get why the Academy honored him with his first ever Oscar. Yes, this performance is very strong, but I personally continue to get tired by this particular actor. He’s always in these Oscar-bait movies and you can see that how he chooses his projects is painfully methodical, and incredibly calculated to win him an Oscar. Again, he’s good, but to me annoying.
The character himself is pretty good though, inspirational and overall realistic and very endearing at times. The movie is successful as a biopic in regard to its subject for sure. But to me the standout has to be the mother. I found her so wonderful and a different kind of inspiration as she stood by her son through and through. She is one of the crowning examples of an amazing mother figure.
And she was played so spectacularly here by Brenda Fricker that she absolutely deserved her Oscar win. There is no doubt in my mind about that whatsoever. She killed it as she’s both believable and very emotional.
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My Left Foot is well directed, but not terribly well directed, it’s just decent what Jim Sheridan did with it. The pacing itself could have been better as the film can be somewhat dull at times. The dialogue is very good though, but it’s difficult to understand Christy many times owing to his disability. But the way they portrayed said disability is done with obvious care and understanding which was important.
So the acting nominations and wins are pretty deserved, but the film had no business being in the nominations slate for Best Picture, and it was just the Academy being biopic-obsessed once more. The same goes for the director and screenplay nods, both incredibly undeserved.
My Left Foot is a standard Oscar-bait biopic which is typical in its narrative and structure, and fairly predictable throughout. It’s manipulative, but also definitely quite inspirational in its story. Daniel Day-Lewis and Brenda Fricker both delivered very strong performances and their characters are the highlights, and their relationship is the best reason to see this movie along with its inspirational nature.
