My Left Foot Review

The scene that sets the terms comes early, when Christy Brown scratches the word MOTHER onto the floor with a piece of chalk gripped between the toes of his left foot and the Dublin kitchen goes silent around him. Jim Sheridan shoots it plainly, from the family's eye level, and trusts it to land. Day-Lewis works from the neck and one leg, and the remarkable thing is not the contortion but the voice, a strangled bark he makes carry sarcasm, lust and self pity without once asking to be pitied.

Brenda Fricker gives the mother a stubborn practicality that keeps the film clear of sainthood, and Ray McAnally's father is a bully you can still recognize as a man. The script by Shane Connaughton and Sheridan is funny about class and cruelty in ways this genre usually avoids, sharpest in the restaurant scene where Christy wrecks a table over a woman who does not want him.

The framing device is the weak link. A nurse reading his book aloud backstage at a benefit gala is a clumsy way to organize the flashbacks, and it squeezes the adult years into a hurried last twenty minutes that skate past the drinking and what it cost the people around him.