While we tend to go through life without paying much attention to this fact, most of the things that surround us every day, making our lives more comfortable, are there as the result of someone dedicating a considerable, at times, insurmountable amount of time and effort to put them there.
One such thing is curb cuts, and one of such people was the late Judith Heumann, an iconic disability rights activist, whose memoir, published in 2020, has become the basis of the new film by Sian Heder, a sort of spiritual follow-up to her Best Picture-winning CODA.
Being Heumann doesn’t strive to cover its heroine’s whole journey, like many biopics do, opting instead to draw her portrait by highlighting one, albeit not brief, page of her fight. We first meet Judith (Ruth Madeley) – Judy – in 1972, while she is trying to navigate the mean streets of New York City in a wheelchair she’s been using for most of her life.
The majority of the story, however, takes place in 1977, when Judy, fed up with the way the world doesn’t take into consideration people with disabilities, leads a 26-day sit-in protest by occupying a Health, Education and Welfare office in San Francisco. The move aims to push through delayed disability-rights regulations after the new U.S. Secretary of HEW, Joseph A. Califano Jr. (Mark Ruffalo), refuses to sign off on them, since the proposed changes would be expensive to implement.
With films like Being Heumann – works that tell uplifting stories of the social justice triumphs – there are almost always some sort of discussions about whether they try too much to be crowd-pleasers, relentlessly Hollywoodizing the source material. Heder’s film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and ended up being a second runner-up for the People's Choice Award (after I Play Rocky, which was the first, and La Bola Negra, which was the winner), which might suggest the crowd-pleasing route. The reality we see in the film is luckily more nuanced.
Since the feature is based on Heumann’s book, Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist, it is firmly set in Judith’s point of view, and also manages to adopt her mindset, previously also vividly represented in James LeBrecht’s and Nicole Newnham’s documentary, Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution. Heumann famously refused to see disability as a tragedy, and the film’s tone reflects that with a healthy dose of irony and dry humor, which is also indigenous to Sian Heder’s own style, as was evident in her previous work.
Interestingly, the film, despite a certain muted color palette and dressing the characters according to the time period, isn’t all that interested in formal reconstruction of the era, focusing instead on the people at the center of it. Being Heumann features a truly impressive cast of actors with various disabilities, led by the powerhouse Ruth Madeley, and, sure enough, it’s Judy and the people around her who are the emotional center of the story.
At the same time, the authors aren’t interested in a black-and-white bad guys vs. good guys narrative. While the characters who represent the system, primarily Ruffalo’s Secretary Califano, can come off cartoonish at times, they are still shown as actual people who do things the way they do not because they’re evil, but because of reasons, agendas, and justifications.
For all the fun shenanigans in it, Being Heumann is mostly a bittersweet movie that serves as a reminder of a deeply ironic fact: the ways of the world are so often changed by the people who lived through being restricted in one way or another, while the ones who possess more room for manoeuvre choose to stick to the status quo.
The film is now playing in select movie theaters, via Apple Original Films.