Beyond the responsibility of making sure a set is running smoothly and safely, it’s the more personal and specific responsibilities that a filmmaker places on themselves that will always be the ones that weigh heaviest and speak loudest on screen. Sian Heder’s work carries baggage, and she always finds a way to deftly lighten that load.
Her films appear to be born from a genuine aching desire to do good, to make something happen, to leave someone inspired and conscious of something they may have been previously ignorant of. In this regard, she soars. Sian clearly admires Judy Heumann to no end, and I left incredibly happy to now know who Judy Heumann is, to know how irrevocable her impact remains today. Being Heumann seeks to extend her resistance, it’s reassuring to know that the filmmaker behind both this and the best picture winning CODA – two stories that demand a lot of tenderness and research from their teller – are being delivered by someone with the empathetic touch of Sian Heder.
There’s an unignorable lack of “experience” happening in the character writing, humour or tone here. I could never shake off my absence of internal conversation; it’s a film disinterested in exploring between the lines, immersing you in a vision. The script is determined to stay in explicitly legible territory, as this is how a story such as Judy’s will be able to reach the number of people that it should. Even at this film’s most angry, it’s unchallenging. You’re always a few seconds away from a tinge of humour and lightness, room to breathe. To imagine a film being shown in schools is in my mind as damning of a statement as much as it is a declaration of its success.
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Creating such palpable safety is Being Heumann’s double-edged sword, some of it I found endearing, most of it reads like fear of losing the audience. The depiction of Judy herself is the film’s biggest swing. As likeable as Ruth Madeley is, Judy quite often isn’t, and Sian wrestles with that carefully. Judy made many disagreeable decisions in a relentless pursuit of equality that ultimately paid off, and it’s equal parts frustrating and admirable for both the audience and everyone in her cohort to see. Many of her supporters regularly challenge her to face herself, and it’s her constant re-evaluating of the values she holds that makes her a compelling subject. It was these moments of conflict that inspired prescient questions, spotlighting the bleak dystopia of what it means to “cross the line” when fighting for one’s own fundamental human rights.
Being Heumann sports an extensive roster of supporting characters, perhaps another double-edged sword. Judy’s success happened because she took the fight directly to the source, bunking for several weeks in the San Francisco HEW building demanding a signature for Section 504, a bill that bans discrimination against disabled individuals and ensures that the needs of all disabled people are met in any public service program that receives government funding. Judy pursued this with the support of an oblivious yet vivacious army of disabled activists that she managed to successfully rope into the cause against her will. With that comes a lot of names, faces, personalities that I think most directors would have a hard time juggling. Heder gives it her best, through these eclectic she injects a lot of life onto the screen but the caveat does becomes the inevitable dead air clogging up a tad too much of the film’s 127 minutes.
Most of the smaller interactions don’t achieve much in addition to their initial sweetness, and they give you a few too many opportunities to see through the film you’re watching rather than live inside it. Spotlighting every walk of life you can means getting very little time to invest yourself in those walks beyond the promising first few steps, so a lot of the sub-stories surrounding the main story get all too happily forgotten. Mark Ruffalo’s anxious and exhausted Joe Califano Jr. shows him riffing on what he brought to 2025’s Mickey 17, albeit with much less zane. In his pursuit to please everybody without spending a fortune, you see Mark squirm and fluster him through Judy’s many roadblocks, and it makes for some amusing back-and-forths. Dylan O’Brien is the more underutilised of our two star power supporters. He plays aspiring reporter Evan White, who’s initially introduced as cheeky, bumbling, out-of-touch comic relief, but he quickly becomes very passionate about supporting Judy’s cause, doing his dammdest to give it the loudest voice possible. Given how naturally funny an actor he is, I wish this character transition was much slower, as I think Dylan is an actor who could break the film out of its sanitised shell.
Given the fairly limited locations, I found Being Heumann to be a surprisingly large film. Nearly every scene shows Heder effortlessly jumping through the hurdle of cohesively wrangling a much larger than recommended roster of characters at once. A lot of which have unique needs to cater to and she displays a strong confidence and kindness in her direction at every moment. Scene chemistry between performers is always present, and there’s careful attention placed towards blocking, establishing power imbalances and comedic timing. I don’t think she has a very discernible voice as a filmmaker, but she doesn’t break a sweat in delivering an extremely competent and watchable 2 hours. All in all, I found this to be informative & comfortable. It frustratingly rejects the notion of bringing you into a feeling; it favours being a largely undemanding stepping stone to amplify Judy Heumann’s wonderful story instead, but that doesn’t mean the story itself isn’t still really wonderful.
★★★
In cinemas from November 6th / Ruth Madeley, Mark Ruffalo, Dylan O’Brien / Dir: Sian Heder / Apple Originals / 15
