December 8, 2010: Temple Grandin
I’ve known of Temple Grandin, though not by name, for a few years since my wife read her autobiography and talked about it a bit. When watching the Emmy awards this past fall, the HBO made-for-cable feature adaptation of her life story was winning a number of awards so we figured it was worth taking a look.
In a nutshell, Temple Grandin grew up in the 1960s and is autistic. Though late to start speaking and never able to relate to people in typical ways, she also has a gift – she sees in pictures. This was an academic ball and chain until she was relocated to a school which could accommodate her, and there she flourished as she discovered that she could envision and design industrial machines and systems better than most engineers. She went to college and then went to work in the beef cattle industry, designing feedlot and slaughterhouse systems which achieve humane and efficient results due to her ability to process the chaos and also to look at things from the physical and mental perspective of the cows, work which she continues to do today alongside her work with groups supporting autistic people.
Claire Danes, though not bearing a strong physical resemblance to the real Temple Grandin, portrays her convincingly in the movie, pushing beyond what I’ve always considered to be limited acting range and fully immersing herself in the role. Supporting performances by Julia Ormond as her mother and Catherine O’Hara as her aunt received critical praise but didn’t strike me as being particularly noteworthy. David Strathairn as Temple’s teacher brings his “mellow and sensitive” style (as opposed to his “tough no-nonsense” persona which he rolls out when appropriate) to the proceedings.
This is a great story for the visual medium of film. We are taken into Temple’s mind with 3D line drawings of things she sees in the world, rotated in space and altered to make mechanisms more efficient and designs more simple. Apart from that, the period production design is straightforward but nothing spectacular, as befits a movie with a TV-level budget and it’s just fine.
HBO movies can sometimes be too light, as in the case of Barbarians at the Gate (1993) about the RJR Nabisco takeover, or The Late Shift (1996), about the early 1990s late-night talk show host scuffle between Jay Leno and David Letterman (a conflict which had an unfortunate and eerily similar follow-up this past year as Conan O’Brien was effectively ousted from The Tonight Show by NBC and Leno). However, Temple Grandin is engrossing and covers a range of emotions from defeat to triumph. Temple ran into not only discrimination because she was autistic, but also chauvinism because she was a woman in a man’s world of 1970s feedlots and slaughterhouses, though her autism prevented her from being grossed out by the slaughterhouse details. Her approach is very pragmatic but also curiously sensitive and common-sense; as she points out, even if we’re just raising the cows for meat, we should still treat them with dignity while they are alive, especially since it can make the whole process easier. She regrets that she’ll never be able to feel emotional connections the way other people can, which is heartbreaking (particularly to her mother), but it’s something Temple has simply had to accept. Temple Grandin is a remarkable woman who has overcome tremendous adversity to become a leader in her professional field and an inspiration to thousands facing the same barriers, and this film is a fitting tribute to her.
Triumphant story of a brave woman.
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