The personal documentary gets very intimate with “The Horse Boy,” an absorbing look at one couple’s novel response to their son’s autism.
As interesting as the movie is, many viewers can be forgiven for wondering where the line between intimacy and “too much information” exists.
The couple is Rupert Isaacson and Kristin Neff, world-traveling adventurers whose lives were knocked for a loop when their son, Rowan, was diagnosed as autistic.
We’re shown just enough of Rowan’s behavior — inexplicable marathon screaming sessions, his incontinence, his inability to connect — to convey the atmosphere in the family home.
Isaacson decides they’ll take the boy on a horseback excursion to Mongolia. Which must qualify as a nontraditional approach to medicine.
They pick Mongolia in part because of a rumored community of shamanic healers, but also because Rowan has displayed unprecedented calm and quiet when around horses.
“The Horse Boy” is a chronicle of that trip, with Isaacson as the gung-ho New Age believer and Neff as his somewhat more skeptical partner.
Cameraman/director Michael Orion Scott is also along, although there’s not much reference to him in the movie itself.
Anybody interested in alternative therapies will find this an intriguing journey and anybody interested in seeing a ground-level view of Mongolia will also respond.
But clearly the central focus is on how parents deal with an autistic child.
Experts chime in at times, noting that the spectrum of autism is broad and still mysterious; these folks include Simon Baron-Cohen, the Cambridge psychologist (who bears an amusing resemblance to his cousin, Sacha Baron Cohen), and the renowned professor Temple Grandin, herself autistic.
The wiggier notions of shamanic healing might be a lot to swallow, yet the openness of Isaacson and Neff extends to their sensitivity about Rowan’s autism, and the possibility that despite the hardships of living with it, Rowan might still be a remarkable person.
For these reasons, “The Horse Boy” is worth recommending.
There is a turn-off factor to the couple’s openness, however, especially since Rowan himself obviously has no say in how his story, with all its roughness and embarrassments, is going to be exposed on screen.
Is it brutal honesty or does it cross the line of exploitation? The sincerity of Isaacson and Neff leans toward the former conclusion, but the question should be dealt with more in the movie itself.
“The Horse Boy”
Intriguing documentary in which the parents of an unreachable autistic boy take him on a horseback trek in Mongolia, in an alternative attempt to unlock his mind. Questions about exploitation dog this film, but if you are convinced of the couple’s sincerity, it makes a case.
Rated: Not rated; probably PG-13 for language, subject matter
Showing: Varsity
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