Worth: $14.00
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Cast:
Bobby Cannavale, William Fitzgerald, Robert De Niro, Rose Byrne, Vera Farmiga, Whoopi Goldberg
Intro:
… refreshing …
More movies with a focus on autism should be like this. While its main narrative is about struggling stand-up comic Max (Bobby Cannavale), father of the titular Ezra (William Fitzgerald), director Tony Goldwyn and writer Tony Spiridakis evidently make all the right moves to help keep their inspired-by-real-life story from entering either of the mainstream extremes for autism portrayal – accessorisation to ‘uplift’ outsiders, or flattery to the point of condescension.
Having people on the spectrum directly involved in production, including Fitzgerald himself, is part of it, but there’s also how the topic is handled on-screen as well.As written and performed, Ezra is one of the more refreshing depictions of autism in recent years. The titular character has his fixations (hell, give him a decade or so, and he could have written these very words), but the production gives him space to be more than just his fixations. The film’s strongest moment is when he lays out bare who he is and who his father is supposed to be for him, showing an emotional honesty that the moments around it often struggle with, in-between the child kidnapping and Jimmy Kimmel Live! aspirations; jarring inclusions both, albeit for drastically different reasons.
Between Ezra, Max and his confessional comedy routines that Goldwyn and DP Daniel Moder shoot like a Bo Burnham special, and Robert De Niro’s Stan bringing back his elder neurotic routine from Silver Linings Playbook, the film presents a series of well-meant but still damaging mistakes born out of a fight-or-flight response covered both by diagnosis and the conspicuous gap where a diagnosis should be. These human errors can get quite out-there (again, kidnapping is a major plot point), but the performances take great pains to emphasise where they go wrong and the cycle of behaviour that leads all three of them to what they have done and, hopefully, what not to do on the next spin.
The frustrations, both from the autistic POV and from those of the caregivers, feel viscerally authentic. Even the frustrations about those frustrations and not knowing how to express or resolve them are firmly grounded, mercifully going in the opposite direction of the warrior parent, ‘look at the size of my shame trophy’, mentality that often dominates the discourse.
For a part-comedy, this can get particularly heavy, and for as much as it gets right both as information and as entertainment, there are points where it doesn’t seem sure whether to reprimand or validate certain decisions. But even at its messiest, there’s a clear and shining purity to its vision that’s worth respecting, both in giving autistics a place to contribute to stories about them and doing justice to the generational reality of that existence. It may not reach the earnest catharsis of Mary & Max or the orgiastic punk liberation of Poor Things, but it still deserves a place in the same conversation about autism on film being more than just the condition du jour.
