The Miracle Worker (1962)

(On Cable TV, January 2021) I wasn’t expecting all that much from The Miracle Worker: to the extent that it’s remembered by movie history, it’s for being about deaf/blind Hellen Keller and how she was gradually taught to communicate by a very patient teacher. It’s an acting showcase, especially given how both Patty Duke (as Keller) and Anne Bancroft (as her teacher) both won Academy Awards for their performance. My expectations for the film, however, stemmed entirely from the formula typically used for other lesser disability-overcomes-adversity films: a mixture of good-natured determination, kind teachers, soft-focused sentimentalism and sweeping orchestra scores at strategic moments. I couldn’t have been more wrong. From the first few moments in which Heller’s mom goes into histrionics, The Miracle Worker takes a very different track. Its approach culminates into an unusually intense and memorable scene: A literal nine-minute physical brawl between the teacher and the student in which good table manners are more inflicted than taught. I am not kidding hen I say that this scene, with the two actresses slapping, punching, kicking and falling around a dinner table, has more to do with a Jackie Chan martial arts sequence than anything else in 1960s Hollywood cinema. Physically intense and seemingly interminable to the point of full-out comedy, the sequence is easily the film’s highlight, but it underscores an approach to the material that is consciously not beholden to the sentimentality that often animates such stories. The film also wisely holds off from being too triumphant in its conclusion, stopping at the point where things are looking up but not following through with bigger rewards. In other words: quite a surprise, and Oscars completionists will get far more out of The Miracle Worker than what they could expect from a film with two acting awards.