Rent My Left Foot (1989)

An incredible, flawlessly acted & beautifully scripted masterpiece, with a seismic Day-Lewis - My Left Foot review by Timmy B

This was a film I had heard many things about before I watched it. I had become a devotee of Daniel Day-Lewis after watching his terrifying & incredible performance as Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York (to me his best work ever.) And whilst that role got him plenty of plaudits & attention after a period of time away from acting, the film that most people spoke of with rapturous wonderment and awe was My Left Foot. I sat down to watch it with my expectations sky-high… This film then proceeded to smash them, burning a beautiful & searing trail, leaving me in awe at not only Day-Lewis’s performance, but also the direction, script & real-life adventures of its amazing protagonist. 

Christy Brown is born into an Irish family in 1932, one of 15 siblings. The family is poverty-stricken & living on the breadline, with only his father’s meagre wages as a builder supporting them, existing in a small house with multiple people sharing beds. Christy is born with severe cerebral palsy & written off as an idiot, unable to speak and only able to use his left foot. But with the support of his loving mother, as well as Christy’s own determination & bloody-mindedness, he becomes a celebrated artist and writer. The film charts his incredible life & achievements, going back and fourth in time.

This performance was the first time that Day-Lewis fully embraced the method acting to which he would become so associated with. But that is the only mention I am going to make of it, mainly because I am so sick of that being the one thing which is discussed whenever his performances are talked about, in many ways reducing his work to sensationalist gossip. Irrelevant of whatever Day-Lewis does, the results are extraordinary.

This performance is in many ways one of the hardest to get right. There are so many pitfalls & dangers for an actor who was previously most well-known for playing a gay ex-Neo Nazi skinhead or a simpering English toff to then portray a severely disabled man who speaks in gutteral gasps & lives in a wheelchair. But from the moment you see his foot putting a record on a player & switching the gramophone on, you are transfixed. Never do you see anything apart from Christy Brown, living in poverty in Ireland, experiencing the difficulties which would come to shape him.

But not for a second does Day-Lewis's talismanic performance overshadow that of Brenda Fricker's as his mother. A woman with a will of iron, who loves Christy unquestionably and believes that he is more than the written-off & dismissed idiot which everyone else does, the bond they have is so tangible it bursts out of the screen. High praise must also be given to Hugh O'Conor, who plays the young Christy having to, in a short amount of screen time, set the stage & make us engage with someone who is as unique and idiosyncratic as they come.

And that last sentence is another reason why I so adore this film: it never for 1 second paints a treacly, facetious portrait of Brown as an individual who is perfect & inoffensive. Christy is an extremely strong-willed, difficult & obstinate man, who is sometimes hard to like. But whereas in one scene you find him antagonising & causing difficulties for himself, in the next his cheeky smile & caustic wit have you laughing uncontrollably.

There is no doubt of the significance this film had on the representation of disabled individuals on screen. And much more could be said about exactly why I love it so much. But quite simply, this is an exceptionally made, flawlessly acted & heartfelt film about an incredible man, who did remarkable things, but who was never anything other than himself, for better or worse.

And especially today, with the amount of absolute rubbish relentlessly churned out by film studios, I so wish we could go back to the days of incredible stories, told by amazing artists.