Today's Man
(2008)
Full disclosure: the father of filmmaker Lizzie Gottlieb and her subject and brother Nicky is my author and friend.But that changes the way I react to this only in personal ways, I think, not in critical ways. The nub of this hourlong documentary, for me, is a recognition, a revelation, that someone with Asperger's Syndrome, for all his difficulties with grasping the individual challenges of others, can understand his own challenge from the outside as well as from the inside--which strikes me as terrifying, as something that would simply paralyze me. Yet Nicky takes it, literally, as a matter of fact: that that is the way most people's minds works, and this is the way mine works. There are many heroes in this story, but none more heroic that the one who stares down a cognitive tunnel knowing that there are wonders outside the tunnel forever hidden to him, yet remains happily at home with what he can see.
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