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.
