‘Waterdance’ Limited by Formula Script

In the first paragraph of his review of the film “The Waterdance” (“A Powerful Dance to Life,” Calendar, May 13), Times film critic Kenneth Turan rejects some of the phrases usually hauled out to characterize films about people with disabilities, such as “uplifting” and “a tribute to the human spirit.”

In this way he gets to have his cake and eat it. He brings up the phrases while showing how enlightened he is by not using them in his own description of the film. It reminds me of when someone says to me in my power wheelchair, “I never thought of you as handicapped until you mentioned it,” leaving me wondering if they have visual and intellectual disabilities.

Turan tells us that “Waterdance” is unforced and unsentimental, not mushy, wimpy or well-meaning, and drops in the fact that the film “just happens to be about three men in wheelchairs.”

That phrase “just happens” always gets me. I am waiting for the ultimate “just happens,” as in “she just happens to have five breasts, an eye where her Adam’s apple should be and a nose on each cheek.”

He describes the screenwriter, Neal Jimenez, as “in a chair” himself since an accident in 1984. Can you imagine how he must smell by now? Later he talks similarly of the autobiographical film character’s “confinement to a chair.” People are confined to a prison or a mental institution. No one is confined to a wheelchair, unless they give up sleeping, bathing, etc.--and sex.

They are actually freed by using a wheelchair relative to being without one.

Enough of Turan’s good-intentioned lameness and discomfort. What about this “brave” film--the word Turan seems to long to use. Yes, it’s a good film, but not as good as the guilt-laden able-bodied reviewers will make it.

“Waterdance” is essentially a crippled formula film designed to meet the expectations of the able-bodied audience. Though more subtle than the 1981 right-to-die tract/movie “Whose Life Is It Anyway?,” it incorporates many of the same assumptions. In “Life,” the newly paralyzed fellow drives his girlfriend away. In “Waterdance,” the hero does the same. “Stay with your husband,” he tells this God-sent woman after she announces she has left her husband for him. The unspoken line here is, “Don’t ruin your life with a guy with my problems.”

In the disabilities world, this idea of rejection by the crip of his man or woman is laughable. It nearly always happens that the able-bodied significant other walks out, with the emphasis on “walks.” This, again, is part of the cripple film formula, relieving the able-bodied audience of the guilt by, in a sense, blaming the victim for his own aloneness. It reinforces the stereotyped vision of the angry, bitter cripple who brings his problems on himself.

The other standard part of the cripple film formula is all of the interminable wisecracking by and between crips, parallel to all the loud laughing that goes on in so many black formula films. Again, it unburdens the able-bodied people of the guilt about how they actually treat disabled people by showing the crip’s life as a bundle of laughs. Laugh, clown, laugh while your heart is breaking.

The unremitting focus on sex and the physical aspect of life and their loss, is what most reveals films like these to be more expressive of the mentality of the able-bodied audience than of the disabled. You can practically hear, “He’ll never be able to play ball with his children again.”

The disabled people I know consider life pretty tough, but spend little time longing to be able-bodied. I never played ball with my children, mainly because I am not interested in sports, but I did much more adventurous things, like four-wheeling in the farthest reaches of Baja. And, despite the trauma of ball deprivation, my boys have grown up just fine.

Movement is not the strong suit of disabled people, yet everywhere you looked in this film there was movement--even to the point of a square dance troupe arriving without notice on the ward. The compulsive devotion to movement and sex serves to make the disabled characters look particularly tragic and incomplete.

If you don’t think about it too much, “Waterdance” comes off as a well-made and enjoyable film. But don’t think you are an honorary crip after seeing it. “Waterdance” captures our lives in the most superficial ways and, in subtle ways, denigrates them.

The use of only non-disabled actors in the three lead roles by Jimenez, himself a wheelchair user, is the equivalent of Spike Lee using white actors in blackface. It says a world about the lack of group consciousness among we people with disabilities.

I am still waiting for a film that shows the unmushy, unforced, unwimpy vistas that severe disabilities open up--such as more time for the mind and aesthetic concerns--rather than portraying what was lost. Some day I’d like to see a crip film where a central character shouts, “Screw sports! I’ve got something better.”