The Kid and I (2005)

When your Daddy's rich you can accomplish your dreams! (no matter how asinine....)

I read a review of "The Kid and I" posted by someone on [...] entitled, "Forrest Gump goes to Hollywood" When I read that title I was a little upset. Having heard that the star of "The Kid I" actually had cerebral palsy I assumed the author of that review was just another member of the public who ignorantly assumed that cerebral palsy and mental retardation went hand-in-hand. I have endured a lifetime of dealing with this insulting misconception and I have a very strong resentment towards government agencies lumping the two together as well. After viewing "The Kid and I," however I really can't blame anyone who would come out of this particular film with that misconception firmly reinforced. There is a scene in the film in which Aaron (the seventeen year-old kid with cerebral palsy) tells Tom Arnold that the neighborhood bully calls him retarded. Mr. Arnold tells him that "it's not nice, and it's not true." I took that to mean that he had no mental disabilities. Yet, you'd never know it from the things Mr. Arnold forces him to say in his lame-brained script. In a scene directly on-point with the person who made the Gump comparison Aaron naively believes that Tom Arnold has punched his assistant in preparation for a scene. In the middle of joining in the slap-stick fun Aaron announces he has to pee (just like Gump.) Aaron is ambulatory and apparently needs no assistance... That's not all, while writing the script for the movie-within-the movie Arnold begins to rip-off "Rain Man." Both of these scenes are well before the one in which we are led to believe Aaron is not mentally-handicapped and even afterwards Arnold casts suspicion, such as the scene where Aaron (he's nearly 18, remember.) asks Arnold to rub his head while sick.
"The Kid and I" is horribly written in every way, in addition to that which I have detailed above, so sadly we may never know what kind of an actor this kid could be. There is a complaint among actors with disabilities, not only do they often do not get to play roles which specifically call for the character to be disabled, but they don't get to play many other roles in which their disability is treated as a non issue. Though the latter might be more important, had "The Kid and I" been a good film it could have gone a long way toward changing the former....
October 26, 2006

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