Video/DVD Review: Radio
What Parents Should Know
Parents need to know that this movie has a couple of bad
words and a sad death (off-screen). In a cruel prank, Radio is
sent into the girls' locker room (nothing shown). Characters
are cruel but learn their lesson. Even though it is set in the
South in the decade after the Civil Rights Act was passed, the
movie avoids stereotyping the white residents as racist.
Families can talk about disabled people they know and how they
are treated. They could also talk about why Radio was so
important to Coach Jones, and how sometimes, if we cannot
correct a mistake we make at the time, we can find a way to use
what we have learned to prevent another mistake in the future.
They could talk about how the coach decided what his priorities
really were and about how Radio showed that he understood some
things better than people who thought they were smarter than he
was.
RADIO begins in 1976 South Carolina, where small town high school football is very serious business. Cuba Gooding, Jr. plays Radio, described by his mother as "just like everyone else, but a little slower." He pushes a shopping cart around and barely speaks. When members of the local high school football team mistreat him, the coach (Ed Harris) invites Radio to watch a practice. Soon, Radio is helping out, and with the coach's encouragement, he begins to interact with people and eventually becomes an "honorary" student. But complications arise when others in the community view Radio's involvement as a liability and a distraction. All is happily resolved in time for the inevitable "We learned more from him than he ever learned from us" speech and the montage showing the real Radio still leading the team onto the field, 25 years later.
Radiomay be as predictable as a Hallmark card, but it's as heartwarming, too. This is a nice, old-fashioned family movie about the importance of kindness. The characters learn that some things are more important than being smart. The audience learns that that lesson can apply to movies as well as people.
It's always a little too easy to have minority or disabled characters in movies serve as saint-like or magical creatures who teach others how to be more authentic, yet this film handles the challenge better than most. Harris and Gooding give their characters depth and decency to provide some grounding for the story and keep it from getting too sugary. But they really have to carry the entire movie. Debra Winger appears in the thankless understanding-wife role (though she does carry a copy of Betty Friedan's revolutionary Feminine Mystique through one scene).
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