My Left Foot

The debut feature of Irish playwright, screenwriter, director and producer Jim Sheridan tells the story of Christy Brown, a Dubliner with cerebral palsy from a working-class family. Brown had minimal control over most of his body but he could manipulate his left foot with great precision. With his foot, the paraplegic became an acclaimed writer and artist. Daniel Day-Lewis stars in the role that won him the Best Actor Oscar and launched him on his trajectory to a cinema icon. In the late ‘80s Day-Lewis was a rising star of stage and screen, playing leads at the Royal Shakespeare Company and beginning a film career in highbrow British pictures like My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), A Room with a View (1985) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988). But it was this picture that provided a showcase for his unique combination of classical English training and American method-actor technique. 

There’s far more to this movie than the impressive, immersive lead performance. The supporting cast of character actors makes the somewhat bleak material uplifting and comedic. And Sheridan captures the lived-in reality of his native Dublin beautifully. While films set in pre-Celtic Tiger working-class Ireland began to pour into the US market after this movie, My Left Foot first brought the distinctive idiosyncrasies of this culture - the colors, the dialects, the architecture, the weather, the music, the sport and pass-times, and the approach to family, to a wide international audience, who related to it and embraced it.

Sheridan captures the lived-in reality of his native Dublin and Day-Lewis delivers a star-making turn as the paraplegic artist and poet Christy Brown.