Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Juxtaposition of Mayan mythology and modern medicine, March 24, 2006
This is not a movie about autism. Let it go.
**Spoilers!**
This is a movie about a little girl who grows up around Mayan tradition, and who is taken away from that back to the States when her father is killed. A lot of the story takes place in memories, visions and dreams, so it only makes "sense" in the context of the Mayan teachings the little girl grew up with. It doesn't translate well to the late 20th Century USA - that's the whole point of the movie. It works in spite of the fact that none of the adults around this little girl have a clue what is happening, even though it's spelled out on the tapes of Sally and the old Mayan man.
She isn't autistic - she's in a trance, on a vision quest. When she and her mother work out the grief, she comes out of it. That's a natural result of such a journey. The ending is beautiful and poetic. The problem is that if you aren't familiar with shamanic traditions, or you don't pay close attention to what the child is hearing and seeing, you won't know what's happening. No one sums it up, and the people around the little girl never pick up on the symbols involved in her healing - cards, The Tower, The Moon- nor do they understand the process they've just gone through.
The child knew enough to heal herself in spite of the adults around her, and her mother facilitates this by following her own intuition in reaching the girl. It's a powerful story - highly recommended.
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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Movie about Hope and Motherhood!, August 18, 2000
By A Customer
This story is NOT about drugs or Autism. It's about a mother's journey to reach out to her daughter and the need to find healing after tragedy. It's a mystical and heart-warming story about a girl who withdraws into herself to reach out to her recently deceased father. Tommy Lee Jones is a court appointed child psychologist assigned to assess her mental condition. Yes, he works with Autistic children, but that's only part of his job. Kathleen Turner is the mother who can't deal with her husband's death, let alone her daughter's strange withdrawal. The child DOES NOT take any psychotropic drugs. She leads Turner and Jones through a mystical journey to find peace for her father's soul and heal the wounds of his loss for herself and her mother. A very spiritually uplifting tale.
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16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
An unfortunate movie about a serious subject, March 4, 2001
By A Customer
Is the little girl portrayed in this movie autistic, or isn't she?
This is an important question to me as the father of an autistic child, because the entire middle of the movie contains one of the more detailed and realistic portrayals of childhood autism that I have seen. There are some lapses, to be sure, but the writers and producers clearly had autism in mind.
This movie was made (1993) in an era when autism was much less well understood than it is now. At that time, autism was considered such a terrible diagnosis that some doctors preferred to make milder-sounded diagnoses such as "PDD." It is impressive that the professionals portrayed appear to be attempting to practice something resembling the Applied Behavorial Analysis methods which have since been proven the prime effective therapy for the disorder.
Yet the movie then protrays a mother who resists professional help not on the basis of reasoned disagreement with a course of therapy, but denial that her daughter has a disorder at all, an attitude that can never work to the benefit of a child with a disability.
Having presented a realistic portrayal of autism, the movie does a disservice to parents who are struggling with the realities of this disorder. First, it portrays a girl who suddenly displays profound features of autism at the age of 6. At the end, it portrays a complete miracle cure, validating the mother's stubborn resistance.
Neither of these events occurs with autism. Autism almost always presents before the age or 2 when a child who seemed to be progressing normally begins to regress. And, except in our dreams, remission occurs only with long, hard and knowledgeable work.
I suppose one could say "they never actually *said* she was autistic. It must have been some traumatic disorder that *seemed* like autism." Then why did they go out of their way to use autism as a dramatic device?
My fear is that a parent facing the reality of a newly-recognized autistic child might use this movie as support to resist the therapy their loved one desperately needs. Good, even wonderful. outcomes are now possible for autism, but not through Hollywood mysticism.
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