O’Conor’s young Christy has the baleful look, the fierceness, the clamped-down mouth that Day-Lewis will have it seems entirely likely that one could grow up into the other. And as she starts to read, raptly, and to see his paintings illustrating its pages, we move into his childhood.
Drinking his whiskey from a straw-and-flask arrangement in his tuxedo jacket, Christy casts a satyr’s eye over this lively, open woman, Mary Carr (Ruth McCabe) and begins his assault, using his book as an opening wedge. The wheelchair-bound, black-bearded writer is put into a drawing room with a nurse to look after him, until his appearance. In his first film, director Sheridan frames the story with a fund-raising ceremony outside Dublin on the estate of Lord Castlewell and (the splendid Cyril Cusack), at which 21-year-old Christy is being honored after publication of his autobiography. Instead, 13-year-old Hugh O’Conor, who plays young Christy, and Daniel Day-Lewis, who picks up at Christy’s 17th birthday, meld to create an extraordinary portrait of a wild, difficult, far-ranging mind, a man unsparing of himself and of others, full of rage and despair, for years full of untapped sexuality, who at last achieves some modicum of heart’s ease. Neither poverty nor Christy’s condition is the subject here they are the givens. Probably because co-writer and director Jim Sheridan, a Dubliner, is from a huge and poor family himself, the film sneers at heart-tugging exactly the way Christy would, and with very nearly his same blunt Anglo-Saxonisms. This son of an impoverished bricklayer was born with cerebral palsy and, in the fashion of the day in 1932, was called a “dunce” and a “poor half-wit” for the first nine years of his life. Of this total of 22, 13 lived.” None, however, quite like Christy. Its tough-minded, unsentimental writing and ferociously brilliant acting-across the board and especially at the top-manage to give a pretty good idea of what Christy Brown, the Dublin-born writer, poet and painter, was all about.Īs Brown began the autobiography he called “My Left Foot,” in honor of the only limb he could control enough to write with: “There were nine children before me and 12 after me. This one you see for the pure love of great movie making. So don’t think that seeing “My Left Foot” (at Horton Plaza) wins you some kind of spiritual merit badge. Who goes to the movies for moral uplift? You want moral uplift, go to the Ice Capades.
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