A first day for me at TIFF, which included Mike Leigh's "Tender Loving Care" — a fitting swan song that starts off almost plotless, driven by banter and dialogue, until its shattering final stretch. "The Only Living Pickpocket in New York" featured a wonderful performance by John Turturro in a film that gets too convoluted as it goes along.
The first big world premiere was Sian Heder's follow-up to “Coda,” and — I'll admit — it's a film that works better than I thought it would, which isn't to say it's a great film. It’s just decently made Oscar bait. That’s it, that’s all.
“Being Heumann” dramatizes the 1977 sit-in that made Judy Heumann a force in disability rights, and it plays like a companion piece to “Coda” in temperament as much as subject. It's warm, well-meaning, more interested in honoring its subject than complicating her. That earnestness is both the appeal and the ceiling.
The plot follows Heumann and a coalition of disabled activists as they occupy the San Francisco offices of the federal health, education and welfare department — the agency now run by RFK Jr. — and refuse to leave until long-stalled protections are signed into law.
The occupation stretches nearly a month. Heumann runs it with stubbornness, and the film treats the logistics of it as a kind of caper: how do you feed everyone, how do you get word out, how do you keep morale up when the building's own officials are waiting you out. The inevitable happens. Public sympathy builds, bureaucrats sweat, and a win is just around the corner.
That middle stretch is where the film comes alive — scrappy, funny, and this must also be the largest ensemble of disabled actors I've ever seen on screen, all feeding off the anarchy. It works. The problem is that the movie eventually remembers it has a message to deliver and stiffens into straightforward crowd-pleasing cliches.
Ruth Madeley plays Heumann, and she gets the character right even if the script rather makes her come off as two-dimensional. Mark Ruffalo turns up as the government stonewaller.
Heder must have taken notes from Gus Van Sant's “Milk,” another San Francisco story about fighting an immovable system, and a film that found something soulful and weird in the fight rather than just the uplift. Heder doesn't get there. She settles for uplift and homage.
Warner Bros' "Practical Magic 2" is off to a solid start, pulling an estimated $4M in Thursday previews after showtimes kicked off at 2 p.m.