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There’s a quality that liberal social-protest dramas tend to have in common. They’re usually about revolutionary moments we’re come through and are on the other side of, so they can encourage the audience to feel —
with a touch of sanctimony — that yesterday’s revolution was never anything but today’s common sense. That’s been true of many movies, even some fine ones, about the Civil Rights movement or the gay rights movement. It’s true, as well, of a film about the fight for union rights like “Norma Rae.”
But when you watch “Being Huemann,” a drama about the astonishing 1977 protest that launched the disability-rights revolution (it opened the Toronto International Film Festival tonight), the film doesn’t give you that sanctimonious “Oh, of course” feeling. That’s because the director, Siân Heder, who made a splash five years ago with “CODA” (this is the first film she’s made since), takes pains to preserve, as emotion and drama, the radicalism of what the movie is about.
“Being Huemann” features a cast of disabled actors playing disabled people, and the actors have a raw, piercing, in-your-face quality that burns away any hint of sentimental complacency. But Heder uses the authenticity of her casting in a super-sly, double-edged way. She’s following up on what she did in “CODA,” where she placed deaf actors like Troy Kotsur at the center of her story in a way that mainstream movies almost never had. The humanity of her characters transcended their disabilities — yet in a way that’s too simple, since the movie insisted on how central the disabilities were to their identities. In addition to telling a great story, “CODA” busted through our pieties about how we characterize people.
“Being Huemann” isn’t as transporting a movie as “CODA” was, yet it’s a stirring drama cut from the same cloth of cathartic empathy. But it’s also structurally bold. The movie chronicles a sit-in, sparked by the disabled-rights leader Judy Heumann (Ruth Madeley), that lasted for 21 days, as Huemann and her fellow protesters entered the Health, Education and Welfare building in San Francisco to confront the officials there, and wound up staying in the building — not because they’d planned it that way, but because that’s how the situation evolved. They were rolling with the punches, the politics, the media, and their own desperate impacted lives of messed-up righteousness. They wouldn’t take no for an answer, and “no” was the only answer they were getting. What they were fighting for was nothing less than the right to be treated — and seen — as full human beings.
Heder echoes the spontaneity of that journey, and mirrors it in how the film invites us to relate to its ensemble. The performances have a casual purity, and are often quite forceful, yet when the protesters first come together, and we’re getting to know them, there’s a part of us that surveys them and says: Look, it’s a person with MS. It’s a blind person. It’s a deaf person. It’s a woman in a wheelchair. It’s a man wearing a brace on his head attached to a plastic orb he uses to tap out letters to say words. At first, the film all but inevitably encourages us to define each character by his or her disability — and the moment we’ve done that, we’ve actually tumbled, without realizing it, down a small rabbit hole of prejudice.
The movie opens in 1972, when Judy, in New York City, leads an early protest, all to try to get the government to pass Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, an anti-discriminatory measure that will guarantee the rights of disabled people to take part in all programs that receive federal funding. (That, of course, is most of American life.) Heder, who has a sixth sense for how to place the camera in a way that’s subjective and electrifying, introduces Judy, who’s been disabled since she was a child and is in a wheelchair, as she’s making her way through the puddles of midtown Manhattan (with Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” on the soundtrack), experiencing herself as an encumbrance. When she reaches the federal building her protest is organized to stand in front of, the whole event (the protesters chanting “Sign 504!”) falls on deaf ears. So she says “Let me down,” meaning down into the street, and she then wheels herself out there and stops a Mack truck right in the middle of Madison Ave. That’s Judy Huemann. As played by Ruth Madeley, who looks like Bonnie Hunts but acts like an officious Joan of Arc, she’s hellbent on gaining the human rights that no one apart from disabled people seems to realize they don’t have.
Cut to five years later. It’s 1977, and Section 504 has been passed into law by the U.S. Congress; it passed by a few votes from people who, the movie suggests, barely knew what they were doing. Nevertheless: a victory, right? Not quite. Section 504 will not become law until Joseph Califano, the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under President Jimmy Carter, signs it into law. And he’s hedging; he doesn’t want to do it. Why not?
This is where the film becomes morally captivating. Carter was the most dogged liberal president of the last 60 years, and Califano — played with weary mid-century bureaucratic testiness by Mark Ruffalo — was a veteran ally of the Civil Rights movement who, in spirit, is very much a card-carrying liberal. Yet he’s a stubbornly conventional one. For him, it’s all about the money — and if Section 504 passes, it will mean that everything from schools to buses to tax offices will have to be made over to accommodate the needs of disabled people. He says that will cost $2.4 billion (in 1977, an astronomical sum). He says: We can’t afford it. But what he means is (and this is the non-liberal side of liberalism): We can’t afford it just for those people.
Judy Heumann, living in San Francisco, is helping to organize a nationwide series of protests by disabled people against the oppression they’ve been living under. Section 504 is now law; they just want the HEW Secretary to sign it. Yet what they’re really fighting is the oppression of being treated as cripples — a hard-wired social prejudice that dictates, quite often, that they can’t go to school or get a job. (Judy talks about how they wouldn’t let her into school until she was 10 because she was considered a “fire hazard.” Which is often the excuse.) And the only way they’ll be able to do any of those things is if the federal government coughs up the money because it understands what disabled people need to live a full life: ramps that go alongside stairways, street curbs that provide spaces for wheelchairs, and the demand that educators, and employers, do not look at disabled people and see a problem but, rather, a person with all the potential that implies.
This is a true upsurge in consciousness, and it’s mirrored by how we come to embrace the humanity of characters onscreen. Judy has organized protesters with many different disabilities, and at one point we see how their priorities clash. The sit-in, which was the longest in U.S. history, takes its spirit from the Civil Rights movement, and from Gandhi too, when Judy goes on a hunger strike. One of the protesters, Brad Lomax (Antwan Tolliver), is a Black Panther, and his Panther comrades help out, bringing food to sustain the journey. Yet what’s dramatic and, at times, scaldingly funny about “Being Huemann” is how the characters’ fury brings them to life, whether it’s Kitty (Madeline Delp) turning her librarian personality inside out or Hale (Andrew Pilkington) tapping out his eloquence of his outrage. Judy Heumann truly sparked a revolution, though it would be 13 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was signed into law. And as “Being Huemann” captures with subversive gusto, the real disability revolution — the one in which we look at someone with a disability and just see another person in front of us — is still a work in progress.
