Oscar-Winning Director’s Latest Is a Cliché-Filled Mess

Courtesy Of Apple CODA ’s empathetic portrait of a deaf family provided cover for its cornball indie treacle, helping it win the most egregious Best Picture Oscar of the past decade.

Five years later, director Siân Heder continues that modus operandi with Being Heumann , a creaky drama—the opening night film of the Toronto International Film Festival, after which it debuts in theaters on Nov.

6 and Apple TV on Nov.

13—that imagines its based-on-real-events tale in utterly clichéd fashion.

Ironically, for a story about unique outsiders fighting to be seen, heard, and accepted as they are, it follows every groan-worthy rule in the rah-rah uplift playbook.

In 1972, Judy Heumann (Ruth Madeley) navigates bustling New York City in her wheelchair, and Heder’s camera adopts her POV to viscerally underscore her arduous day-to-day struggle to get around.

Being Heumann , alas, immediately sabotages this evocative moment by having Judy flip off a bus that honks at her for holding up traffic—a snapshot that’s supposed to italicize her brash attitude but is ruined by the fact that, by occupying an entire lane on Madison Avenue, she’s totally in the wrong and placing everyone (including herself) in danger.

Judy joins fellow protestors advocating for Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.

Though that clause was inserted into the legislation when it passed in 1973 during the Nixon administration, it remained unsigned in the years that followed.

Consequently, Being Heumann leaps forward to 1977 San Francisco, with Judy organizing a group of disabled activists in an effort to convince Joseph A.

Califano Jr. (Mark Ruffalo), the newly installed Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), to do the right thing and put his signature on Section 504.

In doing so, he’d grant America’s handicapped men and women their basic rights—specifically, by forcing federal buildings and schools to install ramps to increase access and opportunity.

In its first few minutes, Being Heumann has one person exclaim about Judy, “She’s crazy!” and another label her a “radical crip,” just in case Madeley’s tough, no-nonsense demeanor didn’t get the point across that she’s a fiery advocate.

Such is the simplicity of Heder and Rebekah Taussig’s script (based on Heumann’s memoir), whose depiction of Califano is equally gawky.