Peter H Brown Clinical Psychologist

Aspergers in the News: “Temple Grandin” & “House Rules”

An HBO biopic about Temple Grandin starring Claire Danes, and a new Jodi Picoult novel bring the issues and experiences of people with ASD to the general public this month. Reviews below:

Temple Grandin

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY     http://www.nytimes.com    Published: February 4, 2010

In her autobiography, “Thinking in Pictures: My Life With Autism,” Temple Grandin explains that she values “positive, measurable results more than emotion.” The HBO movie “Temple Grandin” honors its heroine’s priorities, stressing deeds over tearful setbacks and joyous breakthroughs.

That restraint, unusual in a portrait of a person who heroically overcomes a handicap, is oddly captivating and makes the story all the more touching. “Temple Grandin,” which has its debut on Saturday and stars Claire Danes in the title role, is a made-for-television biopic that avoids the mawkish clichés of the genre without draining the narrative of color and feeling.

Ms. Grandin was born in 1947 in Boston, and her autism was diagnosed when she was a child. At that time most psychiatrists considered it a mental disorder caused by cold, withholding “refrigerator mothers.” Helped by a mother who was anything but, Ms. Grandin was nurtured at home and by a few farsighted teachers who helped her unlock her talents. Most comfortable around animals, she grew up to become a sought after animal behaviorist and livestock consultant, world famous for designing humane slaughterhouses.

In some ways her story is harder to tell than other, similar tales of valor, be they “The Miracle Worker,” “My Left Foot” or “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” in which success is so intimately linked to disability. Helen Keller, Christy Brown and Jean-Dominique Bauby, the subjects of those movies, became famous because of their extraordinary personal histories; in all three cases their most lasting work is autobiographical.

Ms. Grandin credits autism for her achievements, arguing that she would never have been so attuned to animal sensibilities or the fine points of agricultural engineering without the distinctive vision and hypersensitivity that comes with autism.

But to the outside world her eminence and inner workings are incongruent. Ranchers don’t commission her stockyard designs because they are moved by her life story; parents and teachers of autistic children don’t care about her theories on curved cattle chutes, but view her accomplishments as a yardstick for their own hopes.

“Temple Grandin” fuses the two with a wonderstruck look at feedlots and loading ramps and a practical, pragmatic view of autism.

Viewers are thrown into the mindset of the teenage Temple with little introduction or fanfare, experiencing the world as she does: in blisteringly vivid images that pop into her head faster than a Google search and that she describes in her book as “full-color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head.” In that sense, at least, her condition is ideally suited to moviemaking.

In an early scene in which Temple goes to visit her aunt on a ranch in Arizona, she gets off the airplane as startled and fearful as a feral animal. Sounds and sights are heightened — the screeching whirr of the propeller, shouted greetings, the flaming desert heat — to capture how overwhelming and unbearable they are to an autistic girl who flinches at the squeak of a felt-tip marker and cannot bear to be touched.

Ms. Danes is completely at ease in her subject’s lumbering gait and unmodulated voice. She makes Temple’s anxiety as immediate and contagious as her rarer bursts of merriment, laughing too loudly and over and over, as she re-enacts a scene from a favorite television show, “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” And as the character ages and learns more social graces, Ms. Danes seamlessly captures Temple’s progress.

Julia Ormond looms surprisingly large in the small role of Eustacia, Temple’s mother, a fighter who insists that people treat her daughter as “different, but not less.” Ms. Grandin’s autobiography didn’t go into the family background — proper Bostonians with old money. Eustacia Cutler gives an account of it in her own, highly emotive autobiography, “A Thorn in My Pocket,” which has all the makings of a more lurid Lifetime movie and is perhaps wisely left out of the HBO film. But Ms. Ormond conveys the back story elliptically, adding a slight upper class inflection to her voice and showing Yankee stubbornness just beneath her sorrowed beauty. When a psychiatrist patronizingly tells Eustacia that her child has infantile schizophrenia brought on by maternal coldness, she snaps, “I’m supposed to have done this, well then, I can undo it.”

She sends Temple, who loves horseback riding, to Arizona for a summer, which introduces her to her life’s work, as well as a device to relieve her panic and anxiety: seeing how cows appear to calm down in squeeze chutes — metal stalls that press against the sides of animals to still them for inoculation — Temple tries it on herself, and finds comfort in the pressure. She designs a squeeze chute for herself, and that plywood contraption is just one of the many eccentricities that set her apart.

Temple finds a mentor, her high school science teacher, Dr. Carlock (David Strathairn), one of the first to train Temple to expand her intellect rather than merely control her impulses.

Students and other teachers were less kind. So were many of the ranchers and meat growers who stood in Temple’s way — and threw bull testicles at her car — when she began her studies in animal husbandry.

Hers is a tale that could be easily be played up for drama, intrigue and weepy reconciliations, but this narrative is loyal to Ms. Grandin’s credo: emotions are secondary to tangible results. And the result is a movie that is funny, instructive and also intangibly charming.

HBO, Saturday night at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time.

Directed by Mick Jackson; written by Christopher Monger and William Merritt Johnson; based on the books “Emergence” by Temple Grandin and Margaret Scariano, and “Thinking in Pictures” by Ms. Grandin; Emily Gerson Saines, Gil Bellows, Anthony Edwards, Dante Di Loreto, Paul Lister and Alison Owen, executive producers; Scott Ferguson, producer. Produced by Ruby Films and Gerson Saines Productions.

WITH: Claire Danes (Temple Grandin), Catherine O’Hara (Aunt Ann), Julia Ormond (Eustacia) and David Strathairn (Dr. Carlock).

House Rules

March 5, 2010 Posted by peterhbrown | Adolescence, Aspergers, Aspergers Syndrome, Autism, Biography, Education, Resilience, Resources, Social Justice | asd, Aspergers, Aspergers Syndrome, Autism, biopic, Books, Jodi Picoult, media, movie, Resources, Temple Grandin | 2 Comments