The strange text of My Left Foot
1993; Salisbury University; Volume: 21; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
ResumoChristy Brown (1933-1981), the Irish painter and writer, was the tenth child born in a poor Dublin family of thirteen (his mother gave birth to twenty-two children in all, but five died in childbirth and four others in their infancy). The victim of cerebral palsy, which left him virtually paralyzed and unable to speak, he was able to control only his left foot, with which he eventually learned to write and to paint, becoming a water colorist and a novelist and poet (Down All The Days, Shadow on Summer, Come Softly to My Wake, Background Music). His autobiography, My Left Foot, was published in 1954. Jim Sheridan's adaptation of My Left Foot was a widely praised film, winning Academy Award nominations for Best Film and Best Director, Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (Sheridan wrote the screenplay for the film with playwright Shane Connaughton), and an Oscar for Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis. Like so many films these days, My Left Foot begins at the end. After an opening pre-credit sequence that establishes Christy's identity-we see him in his room at home putting on a record with his left foot and beginning to write-we travel with Christy and his family to a benefit for cerebral palsy victims at the home of Lord Castlewelland (Cyrl Cusack), where Christy has been asked to speak. At the Lord's humble abode, Christy must wait in the library until it is time for his appearance, watched over by a nurse, Mary Carr (Ruth McCabe), a woman who would (in 1972) become Brown's wife. His conversation with her frames the remainder of the film. Christy has brought with him a copy of his recently published autobiography, which Mary Carr begins to read as she waits with Christy. We enter and exit this extraordinary text at least four times. The first time, for example, we follow Mary Carr's line of sight into a reproduction of one of Brown's paintings included in the book, and, as we grow near to the page, hear the sound of babies crying, ending, after a cut, in the hospital where Christy was born. Near the film's end, after we exit the book for the last time, Christy finally enters the banquet, at which Lord Castlewelland also reads from My Left Foot, this time aloud to the assembled audience. In the film's final sequence, Mary Carr, succumbing to Christy's entreaties to go out with him, takes him to an idyllic Dublin overlook where they note landmarks-There's Joyce's Tower-and, captured in a freeze frame that ends the film, romantically pop champagne. The core of the film, then, is in Mary Carr's mindscreen;1 all it shows-and all we know-of Brown's life before the benefit comes out of the text of My Left Foot which she reads in the library. (No doubt this is why, in the third present moment scene. Brown urges Mary Carr to Read, read. If she does not, the film will have no past tense.) Given its structure, it would then seem that My Left Foot (the movie) should be a faithful adaptation of an autobiography. It is not. Like most cinematic autobiographies, My Left Foot nevertheless turns into a biography.2 Other than a few subjective camera shots-early on we look up at the comings and goings of the Brown household from the floor where young Christy (Hugh O'Conor) lies; we see the precipice of the stairs he must descend to save his fallen mother; when Christy enters the banquet near the film's end, pushed by Eileen Cole (Fiona Shaw), the camera looks on from wheelchair level at the assembled, applauding crowd-very little is done to recreate Christy's point of view. Most viewers, I suspect, come away from the film thinking of it as a biopic. (Indeed, many reviewers shared this misconception.) But the real problem lies, not in the competent if not very imaginative mise en scene of this, Jim Sheridan's first film.3 The problem must be in the particular text of My Left Foot which Mary Carr reads. Somehow, it seems, a copy of the screenplay of My Left Foot has been substituted for Brown's actual autobiography, for the version of that life she reads and projects onto the movie's mindscreen differs markedly from Brown's literary version. …
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