Film stars Asperger’s
Tell Jerry Newport your birth date, and he’s likely to surprise you.
“He can tell you how many seconds old you are,” says Radha Mitchell, star of the film “Mozart & the Whale,” which opens today in Spokane, Spokane Valley, Coeur d’Alene and Pullman.
“I mean, he knows how many moons have gone through in your lifetime,” Mitchell says in a telephone interview. “Sometimes he calls me up on my birthday and tells me how old I am in seconds. He’s really impressive.”
No doubt. Newport is so impressive, in fact, that he and his wife, Mary, are what inspired Oscar winner Ronald Bass more than a decade ago to write the screenplay for “Mozart & the Whale,” a film about an inhibited math savant played by Josh Hartnett who falls for the free-wheeling character played by Mitchell.
What’s impressive is that Newport and his wife, and the characters in the film, all live with what’s known as Asperger’s syndrome. A mild form of autism, Asperger’s isn’t always easy to detect. Symptoms can include an inability to make friends easily, repetitive physical mannerisms, a strict adherence to ritual (the need for order, for example) and intensively focused interests – such as an obsession with math. But depending on the severity, a person with the condition can lead a more or less normal life.
“I think of Asperger’s as kind of the Diet Pepsi of autism,” says Newport, who was at a reception and screening of the film Wednesday night at River Park Square.
“It’s different in a maddening way because people with Asperger’s aren’t as obvious as people with autism,” he says. “It’s not until they open their mouths.”
“Mozart & the Whale,” which was filmed in Spokane for more than a month starting in March 2004, shows that well enough. The film is the story of two people who, though attracted to each other, struggle because the normal relationship problems they encounter are magnified by their conditions.
As in the film, Newport met his wife-to-be in a support group for Asperger’s that he set up in 1993. They married a year later.
And if life really were like the movies, that would be the end of the story.
But though they now live together in Tucson, the Newports almost didn’t make it. They divorced in 1999.
“After a couple of years went by we decided to give it another chance,” Newport says. “And we’ve been here ever since.”
Getting married was, early on, something that Newport thought he would never experience. Born in Islip, on Long Island, N.Y., he knew from the age of 4 that he wasn’t like other boys.
There was the time he broke into a neighbor’s house because he had to use the bathroom.
“I knew that I had done something wrong,” he says, “but as far as I was concerned, I had obeyed the rules. If you’ve got to go potty, you’ve got to find a pot to go in.”
It was about that time that Newport started displaying his math abilities. He could glance at a long list of figures and do the calculations, and he learned multiplication with only the barest of explanations from his math-teacher mother.
“I never practiced it,” he says. “It was just there.”
Newport graduated from high school in 1966 and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in math at the University of Michigan. Then he lost his way.
“I didn’t have any sense of direction,” he says. “I was so socially disoriented … So I spent most of the next 15 years driving a taxi.”
By the time he met Mary, Newport had held a few “real jobs” – school librarian for one – and he now makes his living as an author and inspirational speaker.
He discovered his connection with Asperger’s when a friend suggested that he see “Rain Man,” the 1989 film in which Dustin Hoffman portrays Raymond Babbit, a man with severe autism.
“I related to the character a lot,” Newport says. “At the same time, I’d never been institutionalized. I figured that I must be somewhere between normal and a Raymond Babbit kind of guy.”
Bass, who wrote “Rain Man,” learned of Newport through Robert Lawrence, who ended up being one of the film’s producers. But even though Steven Spielberg had been associated with the project at one point, it took a long time for “Mozart & the Whale” to reach the screen.
And it did only then because, using a production crew provided by Spokane-based North by Northwest Productions, the film was shot on a tight budget.
Not everyone is happy with the result. Hartnett was quoted in the Star Tribune in Minneapolis on March 31 as saying that he refused to help promote the film because of a disagreement with the final edit.
“This is one of my favorite roles of all time,” Hartnett said, “but I want to see the movie done correctly.”
Hartnett’s refusal to do promotion may be one reason why the film is premiering only in the immediate region.
In response to Hartnett’s comments, another of the film’s producers, Frank De Martini, would say only, “The quote in the Minneapolis (paper) is a misconception of the facts, and the uniformly positive reviews from the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety speak for themselves.”
Though the reviews De Martini cites include some critical remarks, they are generally positive.
“Strong performances anchor this low-key romantic drama about two people with Asperger syndrome,” said the Hollywood Reporter. “Material that easily could have been turned into cringe-inducing TV movie sap has been handled with reasonable intelligence and authenticity,” said Variety.
Perhaps more important, Newport was pleased. And if nothing else, he is the best judge of how well the film captures what affects him the most.
“In my opinion, ‘Mozart & the Whale’ is the best movie yet on autism or Asperger’s,” he says. “It covers far more issues than other movies and treats the people as adults, trying to have lives. It is a good and very important movie for anyone who feels too different to find love.”