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A new movie about autism called Jack of the Red Hearts

Cinnamon115

Well-Known Member
I just found out about this movie this morning. This is the news article I heard about it from. I'm curious what everyone here thinks about it:


When you see characters with autism in a movie or on TV, chances are they’ll fit a certain mold: “Highly gifted, intelligent, quirky, socially odd,” says film director Janet Grillo. “But no matter what happens, they’ll go on to work in Silicon Valley or something, and they’ll be just fine.”

As the parent of a son with autism, however, she knows this depiction is far from reality. “Most people on the wide spectrum of autism are unable to live independently,” says Grillo, who lives in New York and is a film professor at NYU. “Many are functionally nonverbal.”

Jack of the Red Hearts,” out Friday, is about the unusual case of a girl with autism (according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, boys are almost five times as likely as girls to be diagnosed as autistic). The film’s main character is Glory (Taylor Richardson), an 11-year-old with severe autism, whose caretaker (AnnaSophia Robb of “The Carrie Diaries”) turns out to be a teenage grifter, much to the alarm of Glory’s parents (Famke Janssen and Scott Cohen).

Grillo’s son with her ex-husband, director David O. Russell, was diagnosed with autism at age 2. He’s now 22 and residing in an assisted-independent living program in New York.

“He’s not like the [nonverbal] child in this movie — he’s mildly impacted,” she adds. But his independence is still hard-won; he has had two decades of intensive therapy. “He will probably go on to find a mostly independent life, but he’s still going to need support and services,” she says. “And I was always keenly aware of how fortunate we were to have all of these therapies at our disposal.”

Grillo says she was haunted by the knowledge that most children with autism don’t have access to this kind of treatment. “All those resources and time and money being poured into one child. What happens to everybody else?”

One of her goals in making “Jack” was to broaden people’s understanding of the autism spectrum beyond Asperger’s. “My first thought, when I read the script, was that whoever wrote it can’t have been an outsider,” she says. Sure enough, screenwriter Jennifer Deaton is the aunt of a girl with severe autism, who was the inspiration for the character of Glory.

“I do feel that my experience as a mother is my truth in this story,” says Grillo. “My hope is, next time you’re in the grocery store and you see a mother of a child who’s throwing a wild tantrum, instead of deciding that child is a brat, thinking, ‘Maybe that’s a child with autism.’ Maybe saying, ‘How can I help?’ ”


There's a trailer for the movie at the bottom of the article. I'm not sure how to post videos on threads, so I'm just going to put the link to the article here:
http://nypost.com/2016/02/24/director-brings-the-reality-of-autism-to-the-big-screen/

This movie seems interesting to me, but I'm a little hesitant on seeing it. What are your thoughts on it?
 
I can understand why you're hesitant; I think a majority of the Autism community already feel that Autism (not just Aspergers) has too negative an image in the mainstream media, so to see a movie which is going to show a more severe form of Autism and almost certainly the negative traits - is most disconcerting.

Furthermore, it seems like another case of "the parents of autistic children are doing the speaking rather then autistic people themselves"; a notion which also presents the possibility that the movie could be very one-sided and completely ignore any positive characteristics the child in the movie may have. It may not, but its still a background worry at the very least.
Amy Sequenzia - herself a mute autistic (along with having Epilepsy and Cerebral palsy) and a member of the Autism Women's Network - has said in the past about how people would often see her disabilities first and therefore write her off without giving her a chance to prove her capabilities. She's now an activist, writer and poet.

On the positive side, this movie may actually turn out to be alright; possibly correcting some of the stereotypes and helping people be a bit more open to how we are.
It wouldn't be impossible, as movies made about individuals with classic or severe autism have been made in the past to varying degrees. The 1986 film The Boy who could Fly was one of those movies; showing a neurotypical girl meeting a mute autistic boy and actually falling in love with him.
If you took out the fantasy element, I still think it would be a good movie - not to mention the fact it was a movie made in the 80's; a time when one of Autism's causes was thought to be childhood trauma, parents/guardians were still been told to put their Autistic kids in institutions - many of which used unethical practices - and the word 'retard' was still been used as an okay way of referring to certain groups of people.

All in all, I'll be cautious of this and let others voice their opinions of said movie, but I'll give it a chance at the very least.
 

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