Left to his own devices, Peter Seller’s Chauncy “Gardener” exits the cloistered environment in which he has lived his entire life, and—with the help of a wealthy couple who befriends him—is introduced to larger and more important social circles than those he has known thus far. Chauncy rewards their kindness by unwittingly dazzling everyone he meets with his simplistic descriptions of plant care: politicians, journalists, and affluent friends all take his words as profound metaphorical advice concerning government, business, and personal relations. By the story’s close, the wealthy businessman who has been hosting Chauncy has taken our hero’s accidental wisdom to heart and come to terms with his own impending death, the businessman’s wife has fallen in lust with Chauncy (his failure to respond to her sexual advances only heightens her arousal), and a political elite have convinced themselves that Chauncy would make the perfect presidential candidate. In Pumpkin, the young co-ed who falls in love with our physically and intellectually disabled, titular hero experiences a similar attitudinal revolution. Carolyn learns to spurn her sorority’s prejudices and her haughty mother’s wishes so as to embrace a physically and mentally disabled boy who, by the film’s end, has ridiculously matched her transformation with his own, shedding his mobility impairment and slurred speech under the magical influence of requited love.

Such use of hyperbole is the more egregious in films like Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (1994) and Brett Leonard’s The Lawnmower Man(1992), where the pressures of love or science dissolve the deficiencies of the mentally disabled hero and replace them with superhuman qualities. In Zemeckis’s flick, the encouragement of a childhood friend in a crucial moment erases Forrest’s mobility impairment and gives him exceptional speed, just as the love of this same friend will one day give grown-up Gump the drive and stamina to become a championship tennis player, an invulnerable war hero, and a world-class distance runner. This kind of visual and situational exaggeration may amuse, but it also suggests that substantive improvement in such individuals is the stuff of fantasy. The Lawnmower Man, which moves towards the opposite tonal extreme of horror, gives its own disabled character even more amazing powers. Jobe Smith’s participation in a science project that employs virtual reality to accelerate the brain’s development first raises his IQ, and then somehow gifts him with telepathy, telekinesis and other super powers. The movie’s cyberpunk ending has Jobe transferring his consciousness into a mainframe, and from there taking control of all the world’s computers.

Less common—and much needed—are cinematic illustrations of more realistic, successful but continually challenging alliances like the brotherly relationships depicted in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) and Dominick and Eugene (1988). While faithfully capturing the same kinds of behavioral difficulties, emotional capriciousness, and poor decision-making which complicate relations in the aforementioned movies, these two stories openly admit to a never-ending process of relationship-building that requires patience, sensitivity, and a firm commitment to a highly interdependent mode of relationship. When the angst-ridden Gilbert Grape decides, after a narrative predictably filled with family trials and public ignominy, to leave the small town in which he has always lived, he takes his brother Arnie with him. This choice insures that the rest of his life will be as complicated (and enriched) by his brother’s unique needs as were the weeks detailed by the film. The movie Dominick and Eugene also concludes with the able-minded guardian’s leaving home following a series of trying episodes with his brother. Eugene temporarily leaves Dominick behind when he departs to pursue his medical career but, significantly, this brief separation enables instead of limiting the intellectually disabled sibling. Far from abandoning Dominick, the over-protective Eugene gives his brother (who is admittedly more capable than Gilbert’s profoundly disabled brother Arnie) the chance to attempt supporting himself through his job as a garbage man. Instead of forcing his brother to continue playing the role of protected and pitied troublemaker, Eugene extends Dominick a measure of autonomy, planning to return whenever new difficulties require his presence.