‘Waterdance’ Isn’t a ‘Crippled Formula Film’

Bill Bolte’s reaction (June 1) to both Kenneth Turan’s review of “The Waterdance” (May 13) and the film itself are muddle-headed and contradictory, but I can sympathize with the emotions that charge them. I’ll illustrate with what I call the “door dilemma,” which, as a wheelchair user, I often encounter. I approach a door to a public building. When someone helps me with the door, I thank the person, but think to myself, “I can do that, jerk, outta my way.” If the person doesn’t help, appears to be ignoring my existence, I silently curse this rude insensitivity.

Bolte, similarly, seems impossible to please, and craves the anger derived from any perceived slight or stereotyping of the disabled. He attacks Turan for a few ill-chosen phrases (“confinement to a chair,” etc.), and though I agree with him in principle, I forgive a few slips in a review that fundamentally understands and appreciates what co-director Michael Steinberg and I were trying to achieve with our film: to present our disabled characters as individuals, to treat their story with honest humor and to skirt the cliches usually seen in films about men in wheelchairs.

“The Waterdance” is not a “crippled formula film,” as Bolte labels it, and it was not “designed to meet the expectations of the able-bodied audience.” Were that so, there would have been the inevitable athlete brought down in the prime of his career. That character was barred from the set. The film is about three very different men in the first months after injuries have put them in wheelchairs. Unlikely roommates, they must deal with one another, and each must face an uncertain future.

Bolte objects to the humor in the film, which totally mystifies me. In writing of that time in my life, I wanted to show that self-pity rarely reared its head, that humor was a survival tactic. There are a lot of laughs in the film, and audiences are relieved by them, but they weren’t put there to “unburden the able-bodied people of guilt” as Bolte states. I’m not sure what able-bodied people are guilty of--aside from too many of them going to see “Lethal Weapon 3” instead of our film. Humor is part of “The Waterdance” because it’s the truth.

The lead character, Joel, is involved with a married woman, and Bolte objects to the outcome of this relationship, reducing Joel’s decision to break it off to one simplistic color: “Don’t ruin your life with my problems.” That, I admit, would be a ridiculous cliche, but more is going on. In the breakup scene Joel challenges her to truly commit to their love, and he sees she cannot do it. He knows that the breakup--wheelchair or no wheelchair--was inevitable. He knows she still loves her husband. That is the major motivation, not the wheelchair, and Joel is no angry, bitter saint for making it.

The film deals matter-of-factly with sex, and this also seems to offend Bolte. Sexuality is a big concern with these men--as it is with all people--and our film faces that fact. In two scenes, graphically, and a few others, incidentally. The focus is not “unremitting,” and we deal as much with possibility as we do with loss (which seems to be the offense). To have ignored the details would have been dishonest and evasive.

Now to the offense that hits closest to home--that we cast able-bodied actors to play men in wheelchairs. Bolte likens the casting to Spike Lee using white actors in blackface. It’s a faulty analogy, at least--a white man will never become a black man; a walking person, as our film strives to show, can end up in a wheelchair very, very suddenly. Though we cast disabled actors in supporting roles, we could not have gotten the film made without Eric Stoltz, Wesley Snipes and William Forsythe as the leads. That’s an unfortunate reality in Hollywood. Our actors did an amazing job breathing life into these characters, and I am forever grateful to them.

Now I suppose I could have stood up vainly for a principle, refused to hire able-bodied actors, and felt some satisfaction from having done the right thing. As a result, “The Waterdance” would still be a script on a shelf. I think the disabled community at large is better served with the film produced and in the theaters.