RAIN MAN (1988)

THE FILM

FILM DIRECTOR: Barry Levinson

SCREENWRITER: Ronald Bass, Barry Morrow

FILM STARS: Dustin Hoffman, Tom Cruise, Valeria Golino, Jerry Molen, Ralph Seymour, Michael D. Roberts, Bonnie Hunt, Beth Grant, Lucinda Jenney, Barry Levinson, Bob Heckel

COUNTRY: USA

THIS BOOK

AUTHOR: Leonore Fleischer

TYPE: Novelisation

PUBLISHER: Penguin

THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1989

COUNTRY: Australia

COVER: Paperback

THE ORIGINAL BOOK

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above

YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1989

ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The film title

NOTES

GENRE: Drama

WORDS: Rain Man was one of those films the Academy Awards loves. It has a linear told familiar script with drama and comedy, a moral heart that will leave you uplifted at the end, and by good acting, good direction, good photography.

It is smart enough to throw up seemingly hard questions which are resolved or at least addressed by the end. Everything in it clicks and works like a fine oiled machine.

It is also a film were the script never really answers any questions or explores any moral questions in any depth (as opposed to resolving plot situations), where the drama isn’t uncomfortable, the comedy isn’t alienating, the emotion isn’t deep, where the actors are acting, where the direction is slick and anonymous, and where the photography is sharp.

It is all clean lines with nothing to make you squirm in your seat which the Academy loves (and love it they did – it won Best Picture, Director, Actor (Hoffman) and Screenplay)

Just like many of the recent Oscar Best Picture winners it is also very middle brow.

And maybe the world was middlebrow – the film was a hit worldwide and the highest grossing film in 1988 in the US.  To appeal to that many people you have to have something for everyone. And, don’t get me wrong there is nothing wrong with big box office appeal, but, big box office plus Oscar wins, usually, but not all always, end up in the worst of middle brow entertainments.

The films are big and banal though with some minor message thrown in. They are films that can be watched, enjoyed (sometimes), and then forgotten.  All big box office and best Picture winners : Ordinary People (1980), Chariots of Fire (1981), Gandhi (1982), Terms of Endearment (1983), Out of Africa (1985), The Last Emperor (1987), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Forrest Gump (1994), The English Patient (1996), American Beauty (1999), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Million Dollar Baby (2004), 12 Years A Slave (2013), Spotlight (2015), Moonlight (2016), Green Book (2018), CODA (2021).

Rain Man is (a better) one of those.

The film is a old buddy road film with the buddies being two brothers (Cruise and Hoffman – unlikely as there is 25 years difference in ages). The younger brother is confronted with an older brother he did not know about who is some sort of Savant syndrome, autistic type. His hostility and cynicism grow to love as they travel across America. The film is basically a riff on Steinbeck’s novel “Of Mice and Men” but the characters in Rain Man live in a vacuum with a pot of gold (the inheritance) at the end and don’t confront the hard issues of humans dealing with each other and accepting each other as they come.

I recall I enjoyed the film (when I saw it in the 90s) but haven’t seen it since, nor need to see it again (but maybe I will). Hoffman pulls out another good performance in a role which was always going to win accolades for whoever played it, and Tom is eager (and annoying), in that early Tom Cruise way. The film boosted his (already on a roll) career immeasurably. Levinson’s direction is slick as it always is (there are no rough edges on his films (he is like the Spielberg of drama), but like Fred Zinnemann he is a good craftsman and master puppeteer as long as you don’t mind seeing the strings. His best film is his first film, the wonderful Diner (1982).

Writers Barry Morrow (the not dissimilar Bill (1981), and Bill: On His Own (1983), Gospa (1995), Mercy of the Sea (2003)) and Ron Bass (Black Widow (1987), The Joy Luck Club (1993), When a Man Loves a Woman (1994), Swing Vote (1999), Snow Falling on Cedars (1999) … and, his best Gardens of Stone (1987) which isn’t that different to the others though it does have Francis Ford Coppola as director)) write thoughtful dramatic entertainments.

The film also has one of those awful Hans Zimmer 1980s scores which seriously date it, or would, I suspect, date it if I watched it again now.

It’s the type of dramatic feel good film which lends itself to potential excess which we see in many of the woke uplifting films of recent years. If remade today it would, no doubt, win many awards all over again, and not be nearly as good.

On the plus side the film was such a success that it increased awareness of people with autism and savant syndrome.

No need to read the novelisation.

Writer Leonore Fleischer is one of the giants of novelisations. She has written 40 plus novelisations under her own name or under pseudonyms

She said in 1977, “I paint by numbers, I confess it. I pad out, supply background, impute motivation, invent gestures. I ride on the coat-tails of somebody else’s creation. But work is work and I’m as good as the best of the rest – just ask my agent. Ask the kids who read Benji. Ask Stephen Sondheim and Tony Perkins; I novelized The Last of Sheila. They loved my book; I never saw their film. I never see any of the films. I’m lucky if I get to see stills.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonore_Fleischer

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