‘Being Heumann’ Apple TV Review: Siân Heder’s Follow-Up to ‘CODA’ Is a Sincere, Straightforward Drama About the Fight for Disability Rights

For reasons that surely have nothing to do with its origins, Being Heumann, the new film from CODA director Siân Heder, arrives with unusual relevance. The story follows a group of disabled people fighting to make the government enforce a law guaranteeing their rights, and it opens at a strikingly similar moment here at home in Argentina. The country is awash in marches and protests by disabled people and their families, demanding that laws already on the books actually be put into practice. The laws and circumstances are different, but the impact is felt all the same.

Set that sudden timeliness aside, and Being Heumann is a traditional protest film, a «David versus Goliath» story in the mold the subgenre has followed since the days of Frank Capra. Sincere, humanistic and well-intentioned, though a little clumsy dramatically and rather linear, it’s comparable in more ways than one to Heder’s previous film, about a deaf family and a daughter who wanted to be a singer. Where that film bet on family drama, this one bets on social drama, turning private struggles into public ones.

The protagonist is Judy Heumann (British actress Ruth Madeley, excellent), a woman with a mobility disability whom we first see wheeling her chair down the avenues of New York in 1972 to demonstrate how hard it is for people in her situation to get around on the sidewalks. As a text card at the start of the film explains, a legal provision (Section 504) requires that ramps be built for the disabled, but the authorities refuse to implement it because of the cost and the political fallout it could bring.

The scene serves above all to show the willpower of a woman who doesn’t have the same ease as others when it comes to marching or spending her days making demands in the street. From there the story jumps to 1977 and finds her facing the same problem, because nothing has changed. Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, is now president, and while his administration claims to be listening to the complaints, it still does nothing. Heumann spends her days calling and trying to reach Joseph Califano (Mark Ruffalo), the Health Secretary, who at first claims not to know who she is or what she wants, and then, exasperated, tells his staff to stop putting her calls through.

After beating their heads against the wall again and again, Judy and some twenty people with a range of disabilities (some with mobility impairments, but also blind men and women, deaf people, and others with severe paralysis) go to the federal health offices in San Francisco, where they live, to make their complaints in person, backed by others in cities across the country. A particularly brutal incident of police mistreatment pushes Heumann to enter the building with a number of the others, followed by a reporter (Dylan O’Brien) who is covering the story for a local TV station. Once inside, they press to be received. When no one will see them, they decide to camp out in the building, and they say they won’t leave until someone does.

Being Heumann is about that long occupation and the constant struggle of everyone involved to be heard. What they’re asking for is something that, after many years of delay, eventually came to pass and that we all take for granted today: the ramps found on streets and in buildings that make them accessible to people with disabilities. But at the time, the authorities didn’t want to foot the bill, which was estimated at two billion dollars, in 1977 money. The other big difference from today, at least on the surface, is the hostility, neglect and mistreatment that disabled people endured. Things haven’t improved as much as the more careful public language might suggest, but back then the cruelty, and even the contempt, were plain to see in everyday interactions, whether with police officers, with officials, or with ordinary people on the street.

The film doesn’t stray far from the formula. It includes a few romantic interludes among these unlikely militants, along with the more or less predictable back-and-forth of negotiations and the political pressure Heumann and her group try to apply. The best of Being Heumann comes in its least narrative moments, when the film steps away from its routine dramatic progression to listen to, and spend time with, disabled people facing a complex and unexpected situation: days upon days camped in a building, without many of the things and people who help them meet their daily needs.

Thanks to those moments of group conversation and confession, we get to know Kitty (Madeline Delp), with her good manners and negotiating spirit; Brad Lomax (Antwan Tolliver), a member of the Black Panthers, who appear in the film bringing them food, and who lives with multiple sclerosis; Hale Zukas (Andrew Pilkington), who communicates through a kind of antenna that points at letters on an alphabet board; and many others. Their pleas, delivered just as some officials finally deign to listen, are moving. That’s not only because of the script, but because the roles are played by actors in similar situations, which gives them a sense of truth. Other revealing moments, and also funny ones given how they’re set up, come from the arguments among people with different disabilities, since a demand that helps one can complicate life for another.

Judging by these two films, Heder is a filmmaker working in territory we might call «populist.» She always tries to win over the audience by touching its most sensitive and human nerves, usually without resorting to predictable cheap shots. The same holds here. Being Heumann is an accessible film, with all the implications that word carries in this case. And if its aim is to make as many people as possible aware of the difficulties, suffering and assorted forms of marginalization faced by people with disabilities, it’s fine that it should be so. Proposals of this kind, closer to old TV movies than to anything else, may not produce masterpieces, but they let a great many people grasp the unmet needs and everyday marginalization, invisible to many, that people with disabilities live with.