Sia’s autism movie: The skunk at the Golden Globes party
One question repeatedly comes to mind during “almost every baffling minute” of Sia’s debut as a feature film director: “Why?” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire.com. Why did the Australian songwriter and pop star veer into filmmaking to make a musical featuring a nonverbal autistic teenager? “Why, against the advice of virtually every living human, did she cast her neurotypical teenage muse Maddie Ziegler as the nonverbal autistic girl?” Why did the stubborn auteur engage in heated social media spats with autistic people about that casting choice? And why, finally, did this movie, with its dismal reviews and a script that “feels like it was Human Centipede-ed together from 400 uplifting Instagram Stories,” wind up garnering two Golden Globe nominations that have put an international spotlight on it?
We all got an early warning when Sia pitched her vision of Music as “Rain Man the musical, but with girls,” said Ashley Spencer in The New York Times. The earlier movie, with Dustin Hoffman as an autistic savant, features “exactly the kind of stereotypical portrayal that disability rights advocates say they don’t want to see.” Petitioners describe the exaggerated autistic mannerisms of Music’s neurotypical performers as “nauseating,” and they protested two scenes in the prerelease version that show the 14-year-old title character subjected to a practice, known as prone restraint, that has caused death. Leslie Odom Jr.’s character actually claims such restraint is an expression of love, while Globe nominee Kate Hudson is taking shots from critics because her character’s journey as an unlikely parent figure becomes more important than anything young Music is going through. The songs Sia wrote for the movie are fine, said David Fear in Rolling Stone. They remind you of why her best music is “such a pure rush,” and each one plays out in a Skittles-hued alternate realm that is supposed to represent Music’s imagination. Unfortunately, everything set in the real world “hits all the wrong notes.”
“I feel sorry for Ziegler,” said Sara Luterman in Slate.com. A dancer whom Sia has featured in many music videos, she was 14 when Music was filmed, and knowing that she meant no insult to autistic people like myself “does not reduce the acute discomfort of watching her clumsily ape disability.” The adults around her should have known better. That said, Music’s central players don’t deserve to have their careers torpedoed by this mess, said Matthew Rozsa in Salon .com. “They do, however, need to realize what they did was wrong and hurtful.” If Music does nothing else worthwhile, it “can serve as an object lesson for future filmmakers dealing with sensitive subjects, reminding them to pay attention to the voices of the communities they aspire to represent.”