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ASPartOfMe
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Joined: 25 Aug 2013
Age: 66
Gender: Male
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Location: Long Island, New York

04 Feb 2018, 1:21 am

Hey Jude movie review: Nivin Pauly, Trisha Krishnan-starrer has heart and humour but not enough depth

Quote:
Jude is different. At 28, he is more socially awkward than a pubescent teen and easily bullied. He is hardworking and, in his specific areas of interest, brilliant. He obsesses about his routine. He refuses to tell lies even if his congenital honesty causes embarrassment to a family member. His idea of frankness extends to telling people hurtful truths that need not be told. He has no friends.

Unlikely friendships are formed, and over time Jude begins to understand his own diffidence better. As he does, his family too starts seeing him with new eyes, not as an eccentric or difficult youngster, but as a unique individual with special problems and gifts.

Art-house director Shyamaprasad opts for a light touch in Hey Jude. In terms of its naturalistic, unmelodramatic narrative style, the film sits well with the likes of last year’s Nivin Pauly-starrer Njandukalude Nattil Oridavela and other slice-of-life cinema that has been a hallmark of the Malayalam New Wave — if you wish to call it that — of the past decade or so. Pauly himself has been one of the stars at the forefront of this movement that has earned massive box-office returns while defying many of the conventions of commercial cinema. In Hey Jude, he plays the title character whose Asperger’s Syndrome is staring back at viewers with any degree of awareness about the condition, long before he is diagnosed in the film.

The delicacy with which Hey Jude treads around its central character in its pre-interval portion is one of its many attractions. We are introduced to his multiple quirks with humour and affection, yet the storyteller is never patronising towards him.

Not everyone on the autism spectrum is a savant, but this expectation has been a widely held misconception about ASD ever since the global success of the Hollywood film Rain Man (1988) in which Dustin Hoffman played a mathematical genius with autism. Possibly because of this false impression arising from a film that otherwise had a huge role in awareness building around autism, and perhaps because I am currently also watching the US TV serial The Good Doctor, in which the protagonist is a genius medico with autism, frankly I have been longing to see a screen offering on someone with any disorder on the spectrum who is not a genius. Be that as it may, Hey Jude does still score — when assessed in this context — because it is not fixated on Jude’s incredible knowledge of oceanography or his calculator brain, its focus throughout remains his confusion about his distinctive limitations.


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Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity

“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman