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Rain Man (Special Edition)

Review by: Alysa Salzberg
AlysaSalzberg@TheCinemaSource.com

Ah, what is there to be said about Rain Man, winner of 1988’s Best Picture Oscar? What’s there to say, that is, if you’re a movie critic. I mean, what you want to do is totally push the controversy button by dissing a much-loved film. But to tell you the truth, I can’t really find much to criticize here.

The film’s story alone is brilliant, especially when you consider that when it was written, there weren’t many movies like it out there. Here we get Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise), your typical ‘eighties yuppie who, through getting stiffed in his father’s will, ends up discovering that he has an older brother, Raymond (Dustin Hoffman, in a magnificent, Oscar –winning and -deserving performance), who’s lived most of his life in an institution for mental patients. Raymond is an autistic-savant; while he can’t have normal social interactions, he has a genius-level intelligence in certain areas (to cite one example, when a waitress drops a huge box of toothpicks on the floor, Raymond instantly knows how many she’s dropped, just by glancing at the pile). Since Raymond has inherited Daddy’s fortune, Charlie decides to sort of non-threateningly take him hostage, demanding half his inheritance from the head of the institution, to whom it’s been entrusted. With this odd couple, adventures and misadventures on the road abound, especially considering Raymond’s very particular needs, such as a demanding TV-watching schedule, the position of his bed, and haberdashery from Kmart only. Yet there’s also family secrets revealed, and a bond that grows between the two.

I won’t give away anything by assuming that you’ve seen the movie, or know what happens. What I will say is, even watching it now, at my most cynical and ready to find fault, it was still the moving, intriguing, often funny, very touching film I remembered. So I’m not going to bother with it anymore. It’s an incredible movie, something most people should see at least once. Instead, I’m going to move on to the new Special Edition DVD MGM has put out.

I often think a DVD’s packaging can be a sort of microcosm for what you can expect from the entire DVD, art- and extras- wise. Here, this seems especially true. The Special Edition comes in a slick, frosted cover – but actually, this is just a slip cover. Slide out the actual DVD, and you’ll see the DVD case with a still of one of the film’s iconic images on the cover.

So, what we get inside this DVD is a nice menu, in terms of the artwork – it goes with director Barry Levinson and d.p. John Seale‘s spare, patterned scenes. As for the actual extras, as with the DVD packaging, they’re deceptive. First of all, what may be the most exciting to most people is ...