Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Every day troubles

2007; Elsevier BV; Volume: 6; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s1474-4422(07)70051-0

1474-4465

Talha Burki,

Snow Cake (2006), Marc Evan's sugary tale of autism, stars Sigourney Weaver as the chatty Linda, her sanitised condition consisting mainly of a collection of quirks and eccentricities. Linda even has a sassy daughter, although it is never explained how this came to pass—a glimpse of that particular taboo and filmmakers head for the hills. Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003) is far more plausible in its depiction of a teenager with Asperger's syndrome determinedly pursuing a sideline as an amateur detective. And of course there's Rain Man (1988), the movie that catapulted autism into the public imagination while simultaneously ingraining the savant stereotype. Bizarrely, perhaps the most realistic fictional rendering of autism belongs to US television's nihilistic police drama The Shield, where murderous cop Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and his estranged wife struggle to afford special tuition for their young son. Now we have Autism Every Day, a slender documentary that serves as a punchy corrective to the years of sentimentalised cinema. In a series of short interviews, five all-American mothers explain the raw reality of the disorder. The director is Lauren Thierry, herself a mother to an autistic son (Liam). She uncovers the parents' common experiences: the awful times when the child escapes, rushing heedlessly onto busy roads, or the blank intolerance of passers-by when confronted with a public tantrum. There are nights when the child refuses to go to bed—one mother tells of weeks of disrupted sleep, of having to drive aimlessly all night in an effort to soothe her agitated son. All of which takes a tremendous toll. The unaffected siblings find their childhood relegated to the sidelines, and marriages are placed under intolerable stress. In a passage of brutal honesty, a thirty-something mother, clad in bright pink, recalls the twenty-minute period when she gave serious thought to driving her car, with her daughter in the back, off the George Washington Bridge—she adds that it was only the thought of her other (non-autistic) daughter that stopped her. Nonetheless, in the film's final moments the mothers unanimously reaffirm their commitment: “When I see him do something that he's worked so hard on” says one “it gives me hope that he'll get there. It's just going to take some time.” Exhaustion, financial woes, and constant worry have cast long shadows over these families, but hope continues to flicker.