LaserDiscs of My Left Foot were done a long time ago, so they are only average looking. But the disc has a irritating tendency to buzz and rumble in the low frequencies at the strangest times. The film was originally in mono. This disc is stereo, so I turn off all other speakers during this film. It still rumbles! Disconnect your subwoofer!

It's hard now to imagine the impact My Left Foot made back in 1989, when it was released here in the United States by Miramax Films. It doesn't seem like that big of a deal now – a picture about a writer/painter who has cerebral palsy – "Who would want to go and see that?"

No, there wasn't a whole lot to recommend it going in. Not too many people had heard of Daniel Day-Lewis, even if they had seen him in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), A Room with a View (1986), or The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988). The chameleon-like actor was virtually unrecognizable from film to film. The director, Jim Sheridan, came from God only knew where, with this, his first feature-length film. There was nothing else to go on.

This small Irish movie, financed by several television outlets to the tune of something like a million dollars, was picked up by Miramax Films for distribution. They did the same thing they always did: they threw it out there in the sophisticated venues for film, and if it caught on, fine.

Did it catch on! It is helpful to keep in mind that, at the time, this was a nation awash in Hollywood fantasy / pabulum. The top-grossing films from the recent summer were things such as Batman, Lethal Weapon 2, Look Who's Talking, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and Back to the Future II.

© 1989 Ferndale Films, Granada Television, Radio Teilifis Eireann

It's precisely because one has no idea of what one is going to see in a picture called My Left Foot, that it comes as a real surprise. Who had ever heard of painter / writer Christy Brown? Even after seeing the film and having seen a sampling of his art, people somehow become more interested in Daniel Day-Lewis' interpretation of the man than in the man himself.

This is partly due to the realities of making a film about a painter. It is very difficult to make a movie where the hero is a painter or a sculptor, because the motivations for the hero always center on the need to create. If you show the audience the creations of the hero, invariably, some of the audience will think that the creations (whatever they are) look awful – it's a matter of personal taste that the filmmakers have no control over. If this happens, then you have lost the audience's sympathy; the hero winds up looking like someone who is willing to be a jerk and walk all over people just to create junk.

It's much easier to make a picture about Van Gogh than it is to make one about Basquiat. I have seen films where the creative team avoids this problem by having painters whose paintings you never see, architects whose buildings are never shown (God forbid that an architect would live or work in one of their own creations), writers whose works are never described, and so on.

But in My Left Foot, you are shown a very compelling account of the circumstances leading to the creation of an entire gallery of paintings. Christy Brown's paintings are not to every taste. But they do have a certain something (I have always suspected that Brown's paintings shown in the film are a clever combination of both Brown originals and portraits done of the actors in the film in Brown's style).

There is bound to be something in this film to tug at your interest, however. I recall a pal of mine came back from the picture saying that there was a scene showing the cast building a brick addition to the house, and that to him, it was fascinating to see how a couple of guys would build a room out back – just like that.

I am sure that this was only the one instance he could recall during our conversation. For me, the interest kicks right in with the first scene of Christy's foot putting a record on a turntable. I suppose that this image was chosen because it is strange and not from our experience. You and I – we put records on differently. But the thing that I liked about this opening shot is that the label on the center of the record has been scratched repeatedly by this unusual manner of record handling. I distinctly recall upon my first viewing of the film, that I knew that this was what was going on, and it put me on the side of the film instantly.

My interest was more than caught in the following scenes depicting Christy's childhood. The actor playing the young Christy, Hugh O'Conor, is incredibly compelling during these scenes. It never ceases to amaze me at the manner in which this young performer and Day-Lewis synchronize the actions and expressions of this character. Perhaps they had films they could study (Christy Brown died in 1981). I have always admired the entire shape and handling of the scene where Christy finally spells out M-O-T-H-E-R on the floor. The overhead shot of Christy lying on the floor next to his creation (his message), spent with exhaustion, is the essence of what it is to be an artist. They don't understand, but you must make them understand, you must get through to them somehow!

© 1989 Ferndale Films, Granada Television, Radio Teilifis Eireann

This is where artwork and paintings and the like come from. From this need for expression and wanting to rise above humble (and aggravating) circumstances. Initially, we are shown Christy's foot holding a brush in a shadowy light as he paints a watercolor valentine to a girl named Rachel, for whom he has a crush. The many Browns all live in a tiny row house in Dublin. Everything is in very close quarters. The oldest daughter Sheila (Alison Whelan in her only film), has come home from a date too late to suit her mother (Brenda Fricker). As Sheila gets the standard lecture downstairs, their voices carry upstairs to the shots of Christy painting. The contrast is quite clear to me, anyway. I wonder if it communicates the same thing to others?

There are other times in the film where they use this same device. The sequence where Mother and Da discover that Sheila is pregnant, which seems to set off a chain-reaction release of anger and frustration in the house, is surely the place in the film which either makes or breaks the viewer's interest. In scenes like these, audiences can be expected to either sympathize or walk out.

But I think My Left Foot keeps people in there because of the honesty and simplicity in which the story is told. This is an illusion of course. Many details in the film are quite changed around for one reason or another. One thing that audiences are left to pick up on their own is the fact that the Brown's continue to have one child after another. The thought of possibly repeating Christy's condition never seems to have entered their heads. The actual Brown household numbered 18 at its height.

Christy is, like many creative types, schizoid. He is capable of great physical feats, like playing soccer goalie with his head and masterminding the robbery of a coal truck. But there is a quiet side in him too, depicted in the scenes of his creating and his pinning for Rachel. This need for explosive physical and emotional release from his circumstances is conveyed in an incredible performance from Day-Lewis. After a gallery opening of his paintings, Christy and his doctor/mentor Eileen (Fiona Shaw) and the gallery owner Peter (Adrian Dunbar) go to a swell restaurant to celebrate. Christy has been drinking all afternoon, and you just know that something is going to happen.

Christy has finally gotten bombed enough to say to Eileen, "I love you." He is not in the best of moods to hear her say that she is betrothed to Peter. He proceeds to level the place with his anger and frustration. It's a very intense scene, one that I see as being a great way to indicate that sometimes the handicapped are not as innocent as they sometime appear out of context.

© 1989 Ferndale Films, Granada Television, Radio Teilifis Eireann

Christy's search for love is woven elegantly into the "bookends" of the film. Christy has been asked to appear at a fundraiser at the home of Lord Castlewelland (Cyril Cusack). There is a green room of sorts, where they park our unfortunate guest. For some reason, they leave Christy alone in this room, to be looked after by an on-duty nurse named Mary (Ruth McCabe). She reads Christy's autobiography My Left Foot, and this is how we get into the flashback material.

At the end of the film, Christy is still searching for love. Bitter and somewhat resentful toward Eileen, who had asked him to this fundraiser, she is hovering about in the background. They are on the point of wheeling him in before the crowd, when his flirtation with Mary reaches the boiling point. Eileen has seen this before, she knows that the sap is rising, and it must play out. Christy wants to go out with Mary, who says that she has a date with someone after she finishes with this assignment. This scene is the bare bones, cut-to-the-chase reduction of every man's question to a prospective mate who is seeing somebody else: "Do you love him?"

It's very nice for the bookends to come to this sort of conclusion. Mary takes Christy up on his offer of "100% commitment" and goes out with him. We are informed via a title that they were married several years later. The ending is done in the same sort of understated way as the rest of the film. No muss, no fuss.

My Left Foot became a sensation of sorts. Miramax was able to push the film into an astonishing number of playdates, given that it was an obscure "foreign" film. Daniel Day-Lewis received the Oscar for his performance in the film, as did Brenda Fricker for hers. Jim Sheridan was able to launch several Irish-themed pictures. All of this after Miramax was able to empower the Irish filmmaking community in the wake of Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992), and Jordan was able to do some Irish-themed films with Hollywood money too.

But as is usual here, most of these films were viewed by audiences who have an appetite for hearing about someone other than themselves when they go to the movies, and no more than that. My Left Foot, coming out of left field, based on the experiences of a rare individual, and brought to the screen with great skill, wowed audiences in a way that only happens every now and then. We can be thankful audiences still manage to discover these films in between helpings of Super Mario Armageddon Instinct.

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