Each month, Norm Fougere — the harder thumb of this operation — selects one film worth your unqualified attention and explains, at length, why. He gets no rebuttal from Matt until September. This month: Barry Levinson's Rain Man (1988).
Norm's thumb goes up maybe a dozen times a year. This month it goes up for a road movie where almost nothing happens: two brothers, a 1949 Buick Roadmaster convertible, and six days of highway between Cincinnati and Los Angeles. Rain Man won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay, and it was the highest-grossing film of 1988 — a character drama outearning every action spectacle in a year that included Die Hard. Norm would like you to sit with that. It will never happen again.
The story of how it got made is a demolition derby. Screenwriter Barry Morrow dreamed up the project after meeting Kim Peek, a real-life "megasavant" who could recall the contents of thousands of books but needed help with everyday tasks. Morrow's script — later reworked by Ronald Bass — landed at United Artists, and Dustin Hoffman attached himself to Raymond Babbitt, the institutionalized autistic savant whose existence his slick, debt-ridden brother Charlie discovers only after their father's will leaves the $3 million estate to "the rain man."
Then the directors started falling. Martin Brest developed it and left. Steven Spielberg came aboard, worked on the script with Hoffman for months, and departed to honor his commitment to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Sydney Pollack took over and bailed, reportedly convinced the story had no third act. By the time Barry Levinson — the fourth director — said yes, the 1988 Writers Guild strike was bearing down, meaning the script that won the Oscar was effectively locked mid-chaos, with Levinson shooting through problems other directors had walked away from.
Four directors touched Rain Man. The one who made it a masterpiece was the one who finally stopped trying to fix the "problem": nothing changes Raymond. Charlie is the one who has to change.
This is Norm's favorite fact in all of cinema: Spielberg leaving is the best thing that ever happened to this movie. (Matt disputes this characterization. Matt gets no rebuttal until September.) Spielberg's instincts bend toward uplift — and the entire greatness of Rain Man is its refusal to deliver the miracle. Raymond doesn't learn to hug on cue. The doctors don't discover a cure. Charlie doesn't get custody. The film's emotional payoff is one man leaning his forehead against his brother's on a train platform, and the brother tolerating it. Levinson, a Baltimore realist, protected that restraint all the way to the finish line.
And then there's Cruise. Norm's position, stated for the record: this is the best pure acting Tom Cruise has ever done, and he wasn't even nominated. Hoffman got the showcase role — the tics, the Qantas monologue, the toothpicks (246, in a spilled box of 250, "four left in the box") — and won his second Oscar for it. But Hoffman's performance is a locked room. Cruise's is the door. Charlie Babbitt starts the film as maybe the most unlikable protagonist of the decade, a Lamborghini-flipping hustler who essentially kidnaps his own brother as leverage, and Cruise walks him toward decency one begrudging inch at a time, opposite a scene partner who — by design — gives him nothing back. Every reaction shot in the casino sequence is Cruise doing the emotional work for two men.
The details that survive are the ones a studio note would have killed. Hans Zimmer's synth-and-steel-drum score — his first Oscar nomination — refuses to tell you when to cry. The K-Mart argument plays as comedy until it plays as grief. And Qantas, the only airline Raymond will board because it has "never crashed," was reportedly the only airline that left the joke intact on its in-flight cut.
Norm's verdict, suitable for framing: a drama with no villain, no explosions, and no third-act miracle became the biggest movie of its year on the strength of two performances and a Buick. Thumb up. Way up. See it this month, or Norm will assume you were at the Backrooms sequel and judge you accordingly.