Riding the Bus with My Sister

This was basically your standard Lifetime network kind of drama, with one, horrid exception: Rosie O'Donnell. I hear she produced this movie, which I suppose is the best explanation for why no one on the production acted to remove her for another more qualfied actress.

Evidently Rosie subscribes to the "worst stereotypes of mentally handicapped persons" school of acting. She balls up her fists and hold them close to my chest, like some gigantic flightless bird. She juts her lower chin out, her face frozen with about as much depth of feeling as an extra in a George Romero "Living Dead" movie...and her voice. It is not an exaggeration to say, if it were used against Iraqi prisoners, it would be at the top of the Human Rights violations list. This combination croak / screech - Gilford Godfrey, part Pee-Wee Herman, and part "Which Way Did He Go, George?" - is in fact a talent; neither my wife nor I could actually reproduce this noise she was making. Mentally challenged folk do not look like this, do not talk like this. Her performance insults them.

She is an insult to acting. Watching 10 seconds of her insulted my intelligence as well as assaulted my senses. The actors who worked with her should have their therapy bills covered by the studio.

Beth Simon (Rosie O'Donnell) is an intellectually disabled woman who doesn't have a job and through government assistance lives on a diet of high sugar high carb foods and spends most of the day riding around on the city bus lines. After Beth's father dies, Beth's estranged sister Rachel (Andie MacDowell) takes a leave of absence from her job as a fashion photographer and stays with Beth for three months to make sure Beth is able to support herself. The two initially have friction regarding Beth's unhealthy life choices and lack of direction, but as Rachel observes Beth's daily routine she learns how integral she is viewed by many of the bus drivers and passengers.

Riding the Bus with My Sister is a 2005 made-for-TV movie based upon Rachel Simon's 2002 memoir of the same name that chronicled a year of Rachel's life following her mentally challenged sister Beth around in the course of her life a major part of which included riding the buses in their Pennsylvania city home. The options to the story were eventually acquired by Hallmark and CBS where it was released as a TV movie with Rosie O'Donnell staring in and executive producing the project. Upon release the film was a success in the ratings garnering 15 million in total viewership while critical reception tended to pan the film with many lamenting the film's cloying sentimentality and central performance by O'Donnell. However well intentioned Riding the Bus with My Sister might've been, those intentions are lost in the very hackneyed and obnoxious way in which this story is told.

As the film begins with Beth and Rachel's morning routines cross-cut with each other in the opening credits sequence, there's a clear sense that something has gone horribly wrong in the translation from book to film as Beth condition is presented with a level of over the top whimsy that coupled with O'Donnell's delivery (that many have compared to Pee-Wee Herman including the laugh) feels less like a respectful depiction of someone with a developmental disability and more like a grotesque caricature. While I haven't read the book, I have been made aware of several exaggerations and alterations the producers made such as exaggerating Beth's condition, changing Rachel from a college teacher to a fashion photographer, and killing off Beth and Rachel's father as an inciting incident (with him actually still being alive when the movie aired). With the way the film is made and acted you get the sense the producers homogenized this story to the point all the substance was lost and instead of engaging their audience's minds they simply aim broad shots at the heartstrings using an arsenal of broad archetypes which given it's CBS/Hallmark and it scored 15 million viewers shows you'll never go broke catering to the lowest common denominator.

Riding the Bus with My Sister might have had some better aspirations at some point, but rather than actually giving us a chance to learn and understand these characters we're instead treated to a depiction of the "Magic Simpleton" trope with dialed up obnoxiousness and sentimentality that aims for heartwarming and instead becomes cloying.

Unfortunately the directing gene was not passed down from John Huston to his daughter Anjelica Huston, who clearly has no idea what the hell she is doing and can't modulate Rosie O'Donnell's performance from reaching heights so over the top, it soars through the stratosphere. Hallmark films don't scream quality, but this scrapes some truly horrible depths. The film can never rise above Rosie O'Donnell, who belts out every line and seems to be channeling the worst stereotypes of mentally disabled people, that the film ends up feeling like a parody of the disabled. It's like she ate a handful of amphetamines before each scene and was let loose, never being told to bring it down about 50 notches and that she's making a fool of herself. The script is derivative nonsense, but it's her monstrous performance that makes the film worth viewing for condescending laughs - without Rosie O'Donnell this film would never have become the morbid curiosity it is.

Beth is mentally challenged and can't hold a job, but she is able to live by herself, with some help from her father. Her favorite activity is riding the various buses in her city, and she considers many of the bus drivers to be friends (Eugene is an exception), as well as a number of passengers. Some of the passengers, though, find her annoying and wish she would get a job and stop living off the government. Beth also has a boyfriend Jesse who is a lot like her but can work. Beth is white and Jesse is black, but this doesn't seem to be shown as a problem.

Beth's sister Rachel has a fast-paced career as a big-city fashion photographer. She has to put her life on hold when the girls' father dies, because someone has to make sure Beth is taken care of. Otherwise Beth will end up in a group home, which she doesn't want to do again. There is a brother and a stepmother (and a mother who has long since lost any chance of reviving a relationship with her daughters), but Rachel ends up having to take the responsibility. This puts her relationship with her boyfriend at risk.

I find Rosie O'Donnell annoying when she is being herself or playing a character like her. Beth was ten times worse, at first. But seeing how much almost everyone cared about her made me feel the same way, and I soon felt bad whenever Beth was mistreated. O'Donnell effectively showed not only the normal behavior of someone mentally disabled, but she did quite well in unusual situations. And she carefully showed a tic that Beth often had before speaking.

Andie MacDowell also did quite well as the flawed but appealing character of Rachel. Rachel could be impatient and somewhat selfish, but her concern for her sister won out. D. W. Moffett also stood out as Beth's favorite bus driver Rick.

Some unsettling but effective flashbacks to the girls' early life showed the events that helped lead to who they became.

Overall, this was well done.

Rosie O'Donnell can act. She was great as the wiseacre in A League of Their Own and passable in a similar role in the sequel to Stakeout. Since I'm being generous, her talk show was even entertaining at times, if you go in for that celebrity-fawning type of thing. But this performance is so embarrassingly awful you might question whether she is indeed acting or if she has been struck with what her character suffers from. How else to explain her choices? Mismatched pastel Chuck Taylors with a Tweety Bird T-shirt? A voice somewhere between Pee-wee Herman and Yoda, but without the likability? If Rosie really wanted to do something for the mentally challenged, she would have stuck to executive producing and hired an actual mentally challenged actor. It's not like they could do any worse. From the Forrest Gump pose on a bench on the DVD cover to the Rainmanesque quips, she seems to be changing her characterization every scene. And let's not forget who directed? John Huston's very own daughter. I mean Anjelica Huston must have watched her dad's films. She was practically married to Jack Nicholson so she must have watched his films. Do you not think just a little bit of that talent might have rubbed off on her? This is clearly ego run amok. High-profile celebrities trying "to make a difference" but just demonstrating how woefully out-of-touch they are.