While normally I’m a soft touch for any film about autistic children, one just can’t let something as sappy and annoyingly didactic as this road movie get by without some honest assessment. It’s obvious the film-makers mean well and no doubt the work comes from a place of love and probably personal experience, but that doesn’t negate how profoundly irritating the main adult character is, as well as the conflict-hugs-closure structure, and the hammy acting from a cast that could do better.
The annoying adult in the room is Max (Bobby Cannavale), a New Jersey wise guy who is trying to make it as a standup comedian. Max’s idea of being brutally honest on stage is to do material about his adolescent son Ezra’s autism. That would be fine if it were actually daring, honest or actually funny, but instead it’s jokes about how Ezra (played by William A Fitzgerald) wouldn’t talk for ages as a baby and now he never shuts up.
Max’s ex Jenna (Rose Byrne, who isCannavale’s real-life partner), also Ezra’s mom, is not only annoyed when Max takes Ezra to comedy clubs and brings him home too late for school, but the two are at odds over the best way to handle Ezra’s education and medical treatment. Basically, Jenna is open to having Ezra try taking anti-psychotic medication to calm his behaviour which Max violently opposes; Jenna also wants him to attend a specialist school for autistic kids instead of a mainstream school, the latter being Max’s preferred option so Ezra can learn to fit in to society at large.
This is a debate familiar to just about every family with autistic children, especially when the kids are verbal and don’t have a learning disability. (And let’s face it, cinema seldom makes movies about the non-verbal, extremely challenged autistic characters.) But the film doesn’t explore the subject of mainstream v specialist schools with nuance because the clash seems to only be there to create a crisis so that Max can end up “abducting” Ezra for a road trip cross country. Jenna and Max’s father Stan (Robert De Niro, who has spoken publicly about parenting an autistic child in real life) set off in pursuit; various issue-driven two-handed scenes in all these moving cars unspool musings on whether Max and Stan themselves are on the spectrum too, assorted childhood traumas and so on.
Director Tony Goldwyn also appears as Jenna’s current partner, and his experience as an actor is palpable in the performance-led feel to the material here, which comes across as spontaneous and semi-improvised in places. That’s no bad thing, and empathy for the characters comes through nicely at least.
• Standing Up is on digital platforms from 18 December.
