Not in the frame

From Jamie Foxx’s portrayal of a schizophrenic homeless man in Hollywood’s awards season favourite The Soloist to Sam Worthington’s paraplegic ex-Marine in James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar, disability has been represented by some of the most influential director-actor combinations of the year. But, says Cathy Reay, directors continue to favour non-disabled actors

Nine of the 60-odd films I have seen this year have featured disabled characters. This sounds great on the surface, but consider that none of those characters were played by disabled people, and it isn’t such a brilliant accomplishment.

And in most cases these actors either play a negative stereotype of or completely misrepresent disabled people in the process.

Avatar, a film that has been 12 years in the making since director James Cameron’s last opus, Titanic, stars Hollywood heart-throb Sam Worthington as Jake Sully, a paraplegic former Marine. Jake is recruited to travel to a fantasy world called Pandora in order to save Earth’s energy crisis. But he has to do this by becoming an “avatar”, a computer-generated blue species that can walk, run, jump, swim, climb; all things Jake can’t otherwise do.

So, Jake has to save the world and in order to do it he simply cannot be disabled.

On this side of the pond they do things a little differently. Bunny and the Bull, a new British film from the makers of The Mighty Boosh, centres on a character called Stephen (played by Edward Hogg), with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the result of an event which is retold during the film in the form of his flashbacks. The actor doesn’t have PTSD, but he’s quite convincing at playing out a stereotype: hallucinations, obsessive compulsive disorder and agoraphobia all feature. In several of his hallucinatory episoders, Stephen imagines his friend Bunny telling him to “stop being a freak”, to “snap out of it”, and eventually Stephen reaches a climax where he forces himself to go outside, and suddenly all his problems vanish. If only life was that easy! Not only does Bunny and the Bull subliminally enforce the idea that Stephen is “weird” but it also shows very limited understanding of a condition that the filmmakers have no experience of.

How different can it be when disabled actors take on roles?

Danny Boyle’s British film set in the slums of India, Slumdog Millionaire, features blind actor Siddesh Patil as the character Arvind, who is shown begging in an underpass. The short scene is used to explain a cultural practice in certain parts of India and is done in a respectful, sensitive way. It would have been great if Siddesh had been able to play a character that isn’t just about being blind but at least Boyle tried to make sure that viewers didn’t pity the boy, just understood the situation, and using a person that’s actually blind to do that made all the difference.

It is a shame that other directors didn’t take his lead. Earlier this year Twentieth Century Fox released Adam, a film about a young man (played by British actor Hugh Dancy), who has Asperger’s syndrome, struggling to find love. Not only was the film incredibly condescending towards people with Asperger’s, given it was entirely about the condition it seems ridiculous that the role of Adam should be played by someone that doesn’t have it.

It’s a similar tale in The Soloist, which was released last month to major critical acclaim. It is expected that Jamie Foxx will clean up at the Oscars for his portrayal of Nathaniel Ayers, a schizophrenia homeless man discovered by a local journalist who realises – despite his schizophrenia – how talented Ayers truly is. Unlike the others The Soloist is actually based on a true story. So presumably a person that has direct experience of schizophrenia could just as easily fit the role. Then why, again, are the Hollywood alumni getting first dibs on roles they know nothing about?

The biggest film to have come out of Hollywood this year that actually features a disabled person is The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which stars short-statured actor Verne Troyer as Percy, who is part of a travelling circus. But is this really the only way disabled actors can be taken seriously, by demoralising and demeaning themselves in such horribly tagged roles? Verne should be able to play the lead, or the baddie, to be popular, to “get the girl”.

The number of films starring characters with a disability has shown that Hollywood is ready to tackle the issues but the roles are still being wrongly cast and stereotyped. This will continue to happen unless studios are prepared to, firstly, let disabled actors play disabled, and non-disabled, characters and secondly let them represent disability in a positive, not derogatory, way.