Movie review: Testament

In the comments to my review of the movie Tiptoes, Penny mentions a 1983 movie called Testament for it's portrayal of a child with Down Syndrome:

Child actors with Down syndrome occasionally have small roles in films where their visible difference is not much commented upon, nor does it become a major plot point. I'm thinking of Testament (1983), for example, and last year's Notes on a Scandal. Both smaller, serious dramas, with women in the leading roles--maybe that's no coincidence?

I ask:

Do you think the kids in them are just kids or does their Down Syndrome symbolize something about the mothers' lives?

And Penny answers:

Well, in Testament the boy's mother isn't in the story--he and his father are among the secondary characters, neighbors to Jane Alexander's lead character. I haven't seen it in years, but my memory is that his Down syndrome isn't "symbolic" of anything--they're presented as another ordinary, decent family, father and son, in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster. The film's tagline was "Imagine a day like any other. The children are fighting, the refrigerator is humming. Highways are jammed, playgrounds are filled. Everything is perfectly normal... For the very last time."

But as I'm reading now, the boy's name is Hiroshi--probably a reference to Hiroshima. Oh, hmm, now I feel like I have to track it down and watch it again. No hardship, it's a good film.

I saw Testament on dvd this weekend and I'd agree with Penny's characterization of the boy in the film. Hiroshi's father runs a gas station and Hiroshi is one of a couple orphaned children the main character, Carol Wetherly, takes in to care for -- along with her own three kids -- after nuclear bombs dropped across the U.S. leave her small northern California city intact but vulnerable to radioactive fallout from nearby San Fransisco. It's a grim story despite the fact that the tragedy is sparely shown. There are no bombed-out buildings and very few grisly details of radiation poisoning rendered. The politics of the attack is beyond the intimate scope of the story. This is about the slow quiet death of a community and it's people.

Hiroshi is well-loved by his father and treated with kindness and friendship by the other characters in the film. His Down Syndrome is noted at the beginning, briefly, when one father assures Hiroshi's father that it is basically unimportant and the child is always welcome in the Wetherly home. Hiroshi's part is small in the film, but he's not ever treated as unimportant, expendable or unloved as famine and illness strike the community. And from what I can tell through Googling the name "Hiroshi" it seems that it is a perfectly ordinary and perhaps common Asian (Japanese?) name not meant as any reference to the bombing of Hiroshima in WWII.

Jane Alexander was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of Carol Wetherly. Lukas Haas, who plays her youngest, appeared in his first film here, and Kevin Costner and Rebecca De Mornay also have small but poignant roles.

Hiroshi is played by a young actor named Gerry Murillo who has not acted in any film since. Murillo does have the facial characteristics of a child who could have Down Syndrome, so it appears that this is a film where a child with developmental disabilities was hired to play a child with developmental disabilities, and that he is not symbolic of anything else within the story.