Blessing in Disguise

We are often villains and victims of our own action. We hate being labeled, yet can't help label people all the time. People are often seen not as a constitution of their individuality, but rather merchandise with stickers, on each of which there are descriptive sentences, as few words as possible. Somehow, we are seen only as a member of a group: we typecast or being typecasted only for race, sexual orientation, political affiliation or occupation. Somehow, we are only seen as our biggest flaw or our biggest triumph: a disease, a conviction or a college degree. People are too busy to ask about stories that happened to us, roads that we travelled, people that we met, goals that we sought, opinions that we uttered. Things that are really shaping who we are often taking a back seat, sometime no seat at all.

What makes things worst is that a lot of time such anguish is exacerbated by our self-inflicting assumption. Deep down maybe we all know the world doesn't care so much about who we are, but only care about what we give. We cover most of our identity, in the hope that people will like what we show them.

It is the story about a person who is free from such anguish, and how she changed people's ways of seeing the world.

Like most of the stories, the protagonists have their labels we distinctly remember. Linda's label is autism; Alex's label is conviction. They met because a tragedy. Alex has baggage he can't put down: the guilt that he has been harboring magnified by the tragedy, and aggravated by his understanding that people's tendency to judge by labels. Linda taught him how to forgive and forget, although not intentionally. Our emotion, reasonable or not, stem from our ability of presumption and inference, the absence of both of them is the blessing of Linda's illness, which makes her free from conventional thinking and emotion. Although estranged from most of the people, Linda has a way to embrace the world that is strangely beautiful.

Despite her fleeting appearance, Linda's daughter Vivienne is also the center of the movie. Rebellious, passionate, and unconventional, her gift of accepting people for whom they are and embracing their difference has been recalled by viewers as a vivid comparison to the hypocrisy some minor roles shows in the latter scenes of the film. One of those scenes comes when Linda tries to dance in the wake; one of her neighbors, the one who keeps dropping by wanting to offer Linda help tries to stop Linda from dancing because she thinks it is not appropriate to dance in such occasion. Linda's mother intervenes, sternly asks the neighbor to refrain. The neighbor leaves, unsatisfyingly, even though she can see how happy Linda is, and how much Linda laughs. We are constantly reminded the shallowness and hypocrisy of so-called normal people;we are also reminded the opportunities of boarding our mind if we try to reach beyond our conventional thinking and embrace difference.

Although the story starts with a tragedy, it is by no mean a sad movie. Still I felt tears well up from time to time. It is a beautiful, funny, adorable and inspirational movie, a movie about accepting, forgiving, and more importantly the uniqueness of every life.

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