With the exception of Dustin Hoffman’s role in 1988’s Rain Man, a great many representations of autism in fiction, particularly in Hollywood movies, focus on autistic children and young adults. The inevitability that people with autism are bound to face the responsibilities of adulthood is something that filmmakers often sidestep or overlook altogether. As a result, Hollywood movies depicting autistic youths tend to romanticize them, sometimes even rendering them with mystical traits. One such mystical trait is the ability to set oneself free from the constraints of the uncertain world by flying in the style of Peter Pan.
The 1986 family feature The Boy Who Could Fly, directed by Nick Castle, stars Jay Underwood in the title role, a Peter Pan-like figure of an autistic teenage boy, and Lucy Deakins as his doting Wendy-like love interest. Here is the plot. Millie, a lovely and kind-hearted fourteen-year-old girl, along with her recently-widowed mother Charlene (Bonnie Bedelia of Die Hard), and precocious younger brother Louis (Fred Savage of TV’s “The Wonder Years”) have settled in to a new suburban town. Living next door is Eric, a boy Millie’s age who (we soon learn) is severely autistic, unable to speak or connect socially with others.
As a natural fish out of water and still grieving the loss of her father, Millie, finds herself drawn to Eric, who spends most of his time sitting on a window ledge, with his arms outstretched, as though dreaming of flying. Eric, it just so happens, was orphaned at a young age, leaving him in the care of his often-disoriented and inebriated, but otherwise, well-meaning uncle Hugo (Fred Gwynne of TV’s “The Munsters”). The other adult figures in the film, including school officials and social workers, observe that Millie has made reaching Eric a project to compensate for her own losses. But Millie’s attraction to Eric is as much romantic as it is figuratively maternal. Just as Wendy Darling play-acts the mother figure to Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, she is also Peter’s sweetheart.
The Boy Who Could Fly is, without question, a youth-oriented film. As such, the young characters are portrayed as always in the right, while the adults are either wrong-headed or perhaps they mean well but are otherwise clueless. Millie has to fight strenuously to prove to her authority figures Eric’s uniqueness and brilliance. She maintains that he should not be institutionalized. Rather he should remain in a mainstream school setting.
The movie is about more than just an autistic boy who dreams of flying and the girl who cares for him. It is also a salute to the kind of transformation that Eric makes from boy to angel. It is this theme that can be considered somewhat controversial: the trope of the autistic boy with mystical traits. The audience is led to believe that there is something special about Eric in an otherworldly way. He has the ability to appear on Millie’s windowsill and then reappear on his own windowsill next door in the blink of an eye. Millie also has a long dream sequence in which she and Eric are flying across the nighttime sky, in a scene reminiscent of Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder soaring over Metropolis in 1978’s Superman.
Without knowing the exact details of the film’s surprise conclusion, the audience infers that Eric may in fact be a kind of seraph. There is, however, no plausible explanation offered by the filmmakers for this assumption. Audience members are just expected to run with the idea, no questions asked. These magical themes would be far less likely in a movie aimed at an adult audience. Consider Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, is very much a human being throughout the picture.
The Boy Who Could Fly is heartwarming and a slice of pure fantasy. The acting is fine. Jay Underwood and Lucy Deakins, as Eric and Millie, are a cute couple to look at. People who have grown up during the 1980s will adore this movie; that much is certain. It is a perennial favorite of this author. It evokes feelings of nostalgia and sentiment. Viewers put off by the film’s folk lore might be more comfortable watching Rain Man instead, but I say why not enjoy both.
— April 2021 (first published by Challenge Workforce Solutions)
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