Dark end of the spectrum
Director’s son taught her for real about autism
WHEN you see characters with autism in a movie or on TV, chances are they’ll fit a certain mold: “Highly gifted, intelligent, quirky, socially odd,” says film director Janet Grillo. “But no matter what happens, they’ll go on to work in Silicon Valley or something, and they’ll be just fine.”
As the parent of a son with autism, however, she knows this depiction is far from reality. “Most people on the wide spectrum of autism are unable to live independently,” says Grillo, who lives in New York and is a film professor at NYU. “Many are functionally nonverbal.”
“Jack of the Red Hearts,” out Friday, is about the unusual case of a girl with autism (according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, boys are almost five times as likely as girls to be diagnosed as autistic). The film’s main character is Glory (Taylor Richardson), an 11yearold with severe autism, whose caretaker (AnnaSophia Robb of “The Carrie Diaries”) turns out to be a teenage grifter, much to the alarm of Glory’s parents (Famke Janssen and Scott Cohen).
Grillo’s son with her exhusband, director David O. Russell, was diagnosed with autism at age 2. He’s now 22 and residing in an assistedindependent living program in New York.
“He’s not like the [nonverbal] child in this movie — he’s mildly impacted,” she adds. But his independence is still hardwon; he has had two decades of intensive therapy. “He will probably go on to find a mostly independent life, but he’s still going to need support and services,” she says. “And I was always keenly aware of how fortunate we were to have all of these therapies at our disposal.”
Grillo says she was haunted by the knowledge that most children with autism don’t have access to this kind of treatment. “All those resources and time and money being poured into one child. What happens to everybody else?”
One of her goals in making “Jack” was to broaden people’s understanding of the autism spectrum beyond Asperger’s. “My first thought, when I read the script, was that whoever wrote it can’t have been an outsider,” she says. Sure enough, screenwriter Jenni fer Deaton is the aunt of a girl with severe autism, who was the inspiration for the character of Glory.
“I do feel that my experience as a mother is my truth in this story,” says Grillo. “My hope is, next time you’re in the grocery store and you see a mother of a child who’s throwing a wild tantrum, instead of deciding that child is a brat, thinking, ‘Maybe that’s a child with autism.’ Maybe saying, ‘How can I help?’ ”