Barry Levinson’s Rain Man is a moving road drama that sometimes repeats itself and makes Raymond’s autism too useful to Charlie. Tom Cruise does much of the difficult emotional work opposite Dustin Hoffman’s carefully controlled performance.
Barry Levinson’s Rain Man is worth seeing for its two leads, even when the journey begins to repeat itself. It puts a hustler, Charlie Babbitt, on the road with his autistic brother Raymond and asks Charlie to take another person’s needs seriously. There is enough comedy in their incompatibility to make the familiar lesson tolerable. The trouble is how often we can see that lesson coming.
Dustin Hoffman plays Raymond with a concentration that makes Charlie’s demands seem especially intrusive. He is often funny without making Raymond seem to be performing for anybody else’s amusement. His precision can also become a distraction: after a while, the consistency of the performance tells us little more about the man. That is partly a limitation of Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow’s screenplay, which gives Charlie the clearer emotional development. Raymond remains harder to know.
Tom Cruise has the less conspicuous acting to do, and gives the film its strongest reason to continue. His Charlie begins with a hustler’s selfishness that Cruise does not hurry to soften. We winced at his impatience with Raymond; it is unpleasantly easy to recognise the wish that someone else’s difficulties would stop being inconvenient. Cruise makes that ugliness hard to dismiss as somebody else’s problem. The possibility of affection becomes moving because he has first made Charlie such poor company.
Levinson is good at letting an encounter last long enough for us to revise our first impression of it. John Seale’s cinematography is most effective when it gives the actors room to establish that awkwardness, without making their surroundings the attraction. Ida Random’s production design helps the journey feel inhabited and ordinary, which matters in a story so vulnerable to becoming a demonstration of goodness. That modesty suits Levinson’s interest in behaviour and leaves us free to notice how uncomfortable these men are together.
Stu Linder’s editing is patient with the actors, sometimes past the point at which a scene has told us enough. At 134 minutes, the film allows the repeated clash between Charlie’s impatience and Raymond’s needs to become too predictable. Hans Zimmer’s score also presses for tenderness where the acting has already made a more complicated feeling possible. There are stretches when the film seems reluctant to leave a point alone.
The larger reservation belongs to the writing. Bass and Morrow draw on a dependable road-drama arrangement: put mismatched people together and let familiarity do its work. Here that can make Raymond’s autism seem useful chiefly because it offers Charlie a chance to become kinder. Hoffman gives Raymond enough stubborn independence to complicate that arrangement, but the imbalance remains. We can care about these brothers and still wish Raymond’s own experience interested the film as much as Charlie’s capacity to change.
Approach it as a drama about two particular brothers; its narrow view of autism needs that caution. There is pleasure in watching Cruise make decency look like something Charlie must practise, with no guarantee that we will like him for it. For viewers who can tolerate some repetition, the performances are worth the journey.
