Rain Man Analysis

I would say Rain Man’s reputation lies somewhere in the middle of the spectrum when it comes to best picture winners. It’s not held in as high esteem as a Schindler’s List or Ben-Hur, but neither is it as reviled as a Crash or Oliver!. Instead, it lies somewhere in the realm of the Slumdog Millionaire’s of the world, nether beloved nor despised. After viewing Rain Man, I would have to put it into this middle category, but more towards the lower end of the continuum.
Rain Man tells the story of Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise), an avaricious L.A. resident who seems to make his money selling imported cars. As Charlie and his girlfriend Susanna (Valeria Golino) leave to go on a weekend getaway, Charlie gets a call that his estranged father has died.
My issues are twofold. First, this movie is utterly predictable. It follows the many of conventions of a road movie to a T, such as the characters running out of money and having to concoct a harebrained scheme to acquire funds. Furthermore, the entire relationship between Charlie and Raymond and the trajectory it takes was as conventional and trite as they come, leaving me with very little interest in the story because I knew where it was going from the second Charlie and Raymond go on their road
About a year ago I wrote a paper for an intermediate composition class in college. This paper examined the portrayal of mental illness in cinema and its impact on viewers. One of the things I found was that when a movie links mental illness to greatness (as Rain Man does to a certain degree by making Raymond a savant, instead of just a normal person with autism), it can cause the viewer to think either A) that people with mental illness must be extraordinary people, or B) that only extraordinary people can cope with mental illness. Rain Man runs this risk by making Raymond a savant. This problem could have been solved by simply eliminating the savant aspect of the Raymond character. Granted, he may have been a little less inherently interesting and the whole Vegas sequence couldn’t happen, but this would have prevented any negative repercussions of linking mental illness to greatness.
In short, nothing at Rain Man particularly stood out to me. Hoffman’s imitation of autism is convincing, but too broad to move into the upper echelon of performances. Cruise is fine, but he plays this type of character better later in his career. Levinson’s direction is too understated in all but a few instances. And lastly, the screenplay is as predictable as they come and portrays mental illness in a morally gray way. The combination of the elements results in a below average best picture winner and movie in