On DVD, a Netflix rental.
The story jumps around a bit in time but it is never done arbitrarily, and is always easy to follow. It spans from the mid 1950s to the late 1970s.
Claire Danes is Temple Grandin, born with autism at a time when autism was not yet understood. An indication was telling the mother that the 4-year-old girl should be institutionalized, ostensibly for the rest of her life, because there was no "cure." This movie, and Temple Grandin's life, shows that there is no cure, but it also shows how that cannot hold back a person with the correct motivation.
I've always liked Claire Danes, as a pleasant actress in lightweight roles, but her performance here caught me completely off guard. The biggest compliment I can give is that very quickly I wasn't watching Danes portray Grandin, I was watching Grandin. I have seen many, many great performances in my 50+ years of enjoying movies and none were better than hers here.
Julia Ormond is her mother Eustacia and Catherine O'Hara is her Aunt Ann, where Temple first was exposed to life on a farm while visiting her for the summer before college.
Temple had difficulty but managed high school, and then also college. She was unusually bright, but not in the usual sense. She could not just listen to a subject, she had to visualize it, experience it, and when she did was able to master it like few could. In college her great motivator was David Strathairn as Dr. Carlock, a science teacher. Not only did he stand up for her when others wanted to dismiss her as too difficult, he taught her that when she sees a door (a barrier) she should look it as a door of opportunity. She kept that vision as she encountered barriers, and she encountered them often.
Temple Grandin was both practical and empathetic. One of her specialties became livestock, cattle. She knew they had a purpose, to be killed for our food, but she set out to improve the handling of cattle so as to keep them calm and minimize their suffering. It is estimated that 50% of the cattle handled in North America today are done so by techniques she pioneered and worked to have implemented. Today she is a professor.
A superb movie of a really inspiring woman.
March 2018 update: I watched it again now, it was just as absorbing as it was when I first watched it.
