|
|
A drama about a child with autism. Sounds lie a good idea, a good way to get people to understand the condition but it just isn't working. I wanted to like it but the characters are irritating.
Why can't they just be a normal, everyday family rather than a rich middle class family with three businesses? What do poor people do if they have an autistic child? Why the hell are they opening a restaurant anyway? Running a restaurant is one of the most stressful things you can do, especially if you start from scratch. It demands all your time and is a really risky way to earn a living (particularly when it's in the middle of nowhere as this one seems to be). It's also a selfish thing to do when you have young kids with or without autism.
The woman they bought in to help Joe sits and makes sarcastic comments to all the family, managing to wind them all up. And the expert just happens to be a girl the mum knew at school and was bullied by her (of course she was). And this so-called expert ends up arguing the toss with the mum in front of Joe, which must be so good for him. This is just drama for drama's sake and has nothing to do with understanding autism.
If they don't want Joe to listen to music why did they buy him an i-pad? How the hell would a 5 year old know the right words to all the songs even if he is a 'genius'? No one knows all the right words to all the songs.
And why is Christopher Eccleston's character acting like an idiot? And why exactly is he taking singing lessons? Okay so he's going to end up finding out he's on the autism spectrum, but we all worked that out in the first episode. But again this is drama for it's own sake.
This is a 90 minute play stretched out to 6 hour long (and I do mean l-o-n-g episodes). They should have concentrated on the autism and the child and forgot the other stories.
score 6/10
benjamin-twist 5 April 2016
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3446241/ |
|
8-11-2020 12:29:10