Breathe

Some time ago, looking for an interesting movie to watch on a Friday night, I typed “disability” in the Netflix search bar, and the 2017 movie Breathe came up:

After being paralyzed by polio at age 28, Robin Cavendish refuses to be immobile and with his loyal wife, Diana, becomes an advocate for the disabled.

Okay, sounds interesting, I thought. Plus, it has Claire Foy, and I like Claire Foy. Let’s go.

I started the movie not even knowing it was based on a true story, and that Robin Cavendish had been a real person. Born in England in 1930, he worked for a tea-broking business in Kenya, where he was living in 1958 with his new pregnant wife Diana. In December of that year, he became ill with polio, which paralyzed him from the neck down; he needed to be permanently plugged into a ventilator that breathed for him. In early 1959, Diana flew Robin and their newborn son Jonathan back to England, and into a hospital specialized in “responauts,” where he was given a year to live.

After a year, though, he was still alive and tired of being stuck in a hospital, so against the advice of his doctors, Diana learned all she needed to know to care for him herself and moved him into their home. In 1962, a friend of his created a wheelchair in which the ventilator was integrated, effectively giving him back his freedom.

Until his death in 1994, he was a tireless advocate for disabled people. He helped create not only the wheelchairs, but also numerous devices to help paralyzed people keep their independence—television remote controls that were actioned by slight left-right head movements, for example!

The movie itself was produced by Jonathan Cavendish, Robin’s and Diana’s son, so I assume it didn’t take too many liberties with the general story. While not straying too far from the sweet PG movie you can watch with your able-bodied family, it also does not gloss over Robin’s periods of depression or the moments where Diana is overwhelmed. Of course, we also have more sweet moments with young Jonathan, who doesn’t even realize his daddy is different from other daddies, and with Robin’s friends who accept the new situation without blinking. I’m sure there were many blacker moments that weren’t shown; I mean, it is a movie after all.

I’ll focus here on a moment that bugged me. In the hospital, at the beginning of her husband’s illness, when Robin wants to give up and die rather than live his life that way, Diana forbids it. That irked me a bit, because while it’s true that there wouldn’t have been a movie if he had died, it’s not really the place of an able-bodied person to decide what is best for a disabled person. Right now, we’re hearing a lot from ableds about how “the disabled” have no quality of life anyways so they should be sacrificed to the altar of the almighty coronavirus, and disabled people counter-arguing that nobody gets to judge their quality of life but themselves. In my opinion, this should work both ways: disabled people should not be forced to die, of course, but neither should they be forced to live against their will. It is nobody’s place to forbid us from doing anything to our own selves.

That being said, I suspect this particular line was added to emphasize the love story, and that Diana probably never said anything of the sort.

At the very end of the movie, when Robin dies, she says “Thank you for choosing to live,” which implies that not dying had been Robin’s choice, and not hers. And directly contradicts the sentiment she expressed above. This is obviously a much better way of reacting to the situation than forcing someone to live, but when viewing the two scenes side-by-side it feels like they didn’t exactly know which idea to push; they just went with the most lovey-dovey thing Diana could say in the situation.

And now onto the bit that made me laugh.

At some point, Robin and his entourage go to Germany for a disability conference. They visit a German hospital (pictures above), in which responauts—people with conditions like Robin’s—live in iron lungs, devices that hold the entire person and breathes for them mechanically. At the conference itself, Robin’s doctor stands on stage and points out that “at this conference on managing the lives of the severely disabled there are no disabled people present” (story of our lives, eh?). To which an attendee replies “the severely disabled are on life-support machines, so how could they be present?”

Enter Robin and his wheelchair. He takes centre stage and makes the following speech:

Let me ask you, when you look at me, what is it that you see? Do you see a creature that’s barely alive? Or do you see a man that’s escaped the confines of the hospital wards? Now, I have a machine under this very seat, and it breathes for me. And at home, I have a ventilator by my bed. […] So, I implore you, you go back to your hospitals and you tell your disabled patients that they too can truly live. You all have this power to open the gates and set them free.

(I cut out a bit about Diana because I again suspect the writers of laying on the love story a bit thick.)

And then after the speech, everybody in the audience stood up and clapped.

A bunch of old white male doctors gave a standing ovation to a disabled man who’d just basically called them all ableist bullies?

Sure that happened!

I would like to take a minute to talk about the movie’s poster. Robin Cavendish, played by Andrew Garfield, is able-bodied for maybe a fifth of the film, spends another fifth of it confined to a hospital bed, and lives the rest of it in his home or in his wheelchair. And yet the image they chose to put front and centre to advertise this movie is that of a perfectly healthy able-bodied young man, staring lovingly into a girl’s eyes.

This focus on the love story is emphasized by the tagline: With her love, he lived. Yeah, okay, sure, Diana was awesome and certainly played a huge part in his life. But alternate taglines could be With his friend’s engineering knowledge, he lived, or With a doctor’s advocacy, he lived, or With his friends rallying around him, he lived. Or better yet, He decided to live, so he lived. Disabled people aren’t just pawns in other people’s lives, they have agency and make their own decisions; the tagline implies that his life depended on external circumstances.

And it’s inspirational. Don’t forget that there is no point making a movie about disability if it’s not to inspire the ableds!

In fact, I look at the poster as a whole, I don’t even know it’s about disability. Almost as if it was purposefully slathered in a layer of romanticism to attract as many viewers as possible. Because clearly a film about disease and disability would make no money in the box office. Imagine, someone in a wheelchair on the poster! Oh, the horror! *shudders*

Okay, this review came out slightly more negative than I intended it too, but watching it was absolutely not a waste of time! I learned of the existence of Robin Cavendish, for one thing, which in itself makes it all worth it. Films about disability advocates are always worth watching, even if they’re coated in an inch-thick layer of sugary romance.