How Dustin Hoffman and ‘Rain Man’ changed the Oscars forever
In 1988, the world was introduced to one of the first depictions of autism in a mainstream film through Raymond Babbitt, played expertly by Dustin Hoffman.
A man with an almost supernatural capability for numbers and mathematics, but absolutely zero social skills, Barry Levinson’s Rain Man, and Raymond, in particular, was and is attributed with raising awareness of the condition, but their legacy runs far deeper than that.
Hoffman was showered with praise for his portrayal of the savant, despite not being a fan of his own work, and the ultimate acclaim came at the Oscars, which saw him win his second ‘Best Actor’ prize that night, cementing him as one of the all-time greats. You could argue that Raymond was actually a supporting character to Tom Cruise’s Charlie, but the actual point is that, ever since Rain Man’s runaway success, the Oscars have fundamentally changed the sorts of performances they pick to celebrate.
Just one year after Hoffman’s win, Daniel Day-Lewis netted the first of his three ‘Best Actor’ gongs playing Christy Brown, a man with cerebral palsy, in My Left Foot, and three years later, in 1992, it was Al Pacino’s winning turn playing a blind man in Scent of a Woman. Following hotly were Tom Hanks’ back-to-back victories for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, playing characters with Aids and learning difficulties, respectively, and those are just some of the examples from the late 1980s/early 1990s alone.
Of the 36 ‘Best Actor’ prizes to be given out since Rain Man, 15 of them have gone to performers playing physically or mentally disabled characters, a number that rises even higher if you include things like alcoholism, or if you classify Hannibal Lecter’s ‘condition’ as a trauma response. The most recent actor to win for playing a strongly defined disabled character was Brendan Fraser for The Whale, although you could argue that Cillian Murphy was inspired by the scientist’s real-life mental struggles in his portrayal of J Robert Oppenheimer for Christopher Nolan’s last epic.
Surely it’s a good thing that disabled people are having their stories told in such prominent ways, but it would be better if that representation were genuine. None of the ‘Best Actor’ winners had the same ailments as their characters, meaning Hoffman wasn’t autistic, Pacino wasn’t blind, and Fraser wasn’t severely overweight. In fact, in the entire history of the Academy Awards, only three disabled people have even won acting prizes of any kind, with Daniel Day-Lewis personally owning more Oscars than the entire disabled community combined.
That statistic is part of a much wider debate about ‘authenticity’ in acting, which involves asking whether an actor should be allowed to play a character radically different from their own personality. After all, isn’t the entire point of the art form to embody somebody else? Those are questions with no easy answers, but what is easy to see is that the Academy has become obsessed with disability as a storytelling device, adding to its love for, especially male characters, who overcome significant odds to make something of themselves. These stories are meant to act as inspirations or warnings to a largely able-bodied audience, but how many of them were told with a disabled viewpoint in mind?
It’s been almost 40 years since Rain Man came out, and the same questions pervade still regarding representation in cinema. As long as audiences want to see these kinds of films, they will keep getting made and keep winning awards, and whether that’s right or not is another question entirely.
