My friend has told me how bothered he was when he first read that Daniel Day-Lewis did extreme method acting for Jim Sheridan’s “My Left Foot,” going as far as making cast and crew actually carry him around as he struggled to live his entire life while shooting the movie as a cripple. His work led him to an Oscar in 1989, but his performance as Christy Brown, the genius with cerebral palsy, is constantly on and in actuality crippling to the movie.
Day-Lewis is never not performing in this movie. Even when off screen, we hear Christy’s moans and flailing from the other room over. It’s kind of like Colin Firth recently in “The King’s Speech.” You can see all the work he did right up there on the screen, although even that film had a little more subtlety and charm to it than “My Left Foot” does.
Sheridan’s film is a strict melodrama charting the difficulties Christy had to overcome to become the less-than-a-saint genius he is. We see none of the more peaceful moments of his life where he grew as a painter and a writer, and there are few moments of comedy or laughter that would make Christy’s situation feel less like it was being exploited.
The early scenes with Christy as a child are unbearable in their torpid melodrama, with the father and the neighbors hitting every line with a brick. “He’s just a cripple, ma,” Christy’s father says in a thick Irish accent, and the first pivotal scene where Christy picks up a piece of chalk with his foot and writes “mother” goes on endlessly long. After a while, it’s not a revelation, especially since we already know the boy’s future when the film starts with Christy accepting an award on behalf of his life’s autobiography.
The closest companion film I had in mind before watching “My Left Foot” was the French film “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” but the only thing those two movies have in common is a disability. In Mathieu Amalric’s crippled performance, he somehow finds a way to be funny, flirtatious, bitter and emotionally varied. Day-Lewis’s gimmicky performance only knows how to convey pain, and this is a direct contrast from his brilliant display of range and fire he showed in “There Will Be Blood.”
And while speaking of “Diving Bell,” that film too employed an artistic visual style to convey all he would be capable of even with his disability. Sheridan’s camera is virtually without movement. He labors in the close-up and underscores every scene with an overly tearful score by Elmer Bernstein. He does nothing to vary the sense of melodrama contained within Christy’s story.
“My Left Foot” was a Best Picture nominee in 1989, which upon reflection was not a good year for movies. I’ve now seen all five of the BP nominees from that year, the others being the equally overrated and one-dimensional “Dead Poets Society,” “Field of Dreams,” the perhaps underrated “Born on the Fourth of July” and the horribly dated winner “Driving Miss Daisy.” The best films of that year were either snubbed or forgotten entirely, including the masterpiece “Do the Right Thing,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” “Sex, Lies and Videotape” and “Say Anything.”
There’s your Best Picture line-up right there.