TIFF 2009: The Sunshine Boy

When I first looked at the schedule for TIFF (seems like so long ago), The Sunshine Boy was one of the first movies that caught my eye. I’ve always been interested by the subject of autism. I think it’s because I like to learn about how different people experience the world in different ways. It’s hard to imagine how someone with autism perceives their environment, which is exactly why I find it fascinating.

The film is a documentary which follows the mother (Margrét Dagmar Ericsdóttir) of an autistic boy, as she interviews experts and other parents of autistic children, while trying to find some way of improving her son Keli’s life. The film does a good job of mixing educational material with more personal stories so that it doesn’t devolve into information overload. It’s shot beautifully, especially the scenes showing the family exploring various Icelandic landscapes. As an added bonus, the film uses songs by Sigur Rós as background music throughout; they’re one of my favourite bands and I thought the music suited the movie well.

To me, the driving force of the film is Margrét’s desire to get to know her son. Keli’s autism is quite severe and he is non-verbal, so I believe that the family saw him, understandably, in terms of his disorder, rather than who he was as a person. As she meets other families who have been able to learn to communicate with their autistic kids, she starts to hope for the same thing with Keli, and this hope transfers to the viewer.

Margrét eventually chooses to explore a teaching and communication technique called Rapid Prompting Method (RPM). The method was developed by a woman named Soma Mukhopadhyay to communicate with her own autistic son, and involves the child spelling out words by pointing at a board with letters on it. (It’s more complicated than that, but that is the ultimate goal that they work towards.)

This is where my feelings got a little ambiguous. I’m a skeptic at heart, and I began to doubt the authenticity of RPM and the letter board technique. In all the scenes where they showed the kids “speaking” with the letter board, Soma is holding the board. It almost seems as if she is moving the board as much as the kids are pointing to it. How much is Soma leading it or at least anticipating what the kids are going to say? Is she using the film to sell her method by making it look more effective than it really is?

My ambivalence and doubt reached its peak in one scene which could be considered the climax of the movie. We see Keli talking with Soma through the letter board while Margrét watches. The scene is either one of the most moving scenes I’ve seen in a while, or a somewhat exploitative fabrication, depending on whether I believe that RPM is what it claims to be.

I have been swinging back and forth between these two positions since I saw the film. When I was sitting, watching in the theatre, I had on my skeptical hat and was dismissive of the scene. However, when I got home and lay in bed trying to fall asleep, I thought back to it and changed my mind a little. There certainly is a lot of power in the words that Keli says, which, when coupled with the Sigur Rós song (“Ára bátur”) playing in the background, brought me close to tears just from thinking about it. (I won’t reveal what he says because I think it needs to be experienced by watching the film.)

In the end, though, I don’t believe that there’s any black and white way of judging a teaching system or technique, and I’m sure that it works better for some people than others. My skepticism doesn’t take away from what I think is the main message of the film: that autistic kids are capable of more than their condition would seem to allow on the surface, and that there is hope for reaching them through various techniques. Whether or not I fully buy into RPM in particular, the film is very informative and thought-provoking.

3.5 out of 5