OCEAN HEAVEN (China, Hong Kong, 2010)
Directed by: Xue Xiaolu
Starring: Jet Li, Wen Zhang, Guey Lun-mei, Zhu Yuanyuan

Any movie that starts with Jet Li trying to kill his autistic son and then himself, is a movie you need to sit up and pay attention to. Dry-eyed, straightforward and completely unsentimental, OCEAN HEAVEN is the best movie about autism ever made, from any country. Devoid of sappiness, scrubbed clean of melodrama, it’s about a blue collar father trying to figure out just how the hell he’s going to provide for his autistic son after he’s gone.

The talent involved is insane. Chris Doyle, the world’s most expressive cinematographer (he shot almost every Wong Kar-wai movie) is on board and Joe Hisaishi (collaborator of choice for both Hayao Miyazaki and Takeshi Kitano) wrote the score. The movie is edited by Wong Kar-wai’s longtime editor and production designer, William Chang, and first-time director, Xue Xiaolu, is not only a female director, rare in China, but she’s spent the last 14 years working with autistic children.

Jet Li, who took one dollar in salary, gives his first non-action performance as Wang Xincheng, a buttoned-down electrician at a water park trying to raise his 22 year-old autistic son, Dafu (Wen Zhang). Realizing he isn’t going to be around forever, Xincheng is desperate to teach his son how to use money, take the bus and find his way to the local convenience store by himself, but Dafu isn’t cooperating with anyone. He wants to go swimming, look at the fish and follow the urgings of his autistic brain, which is like a separate country locked away inside his skull, untouched by the world the rest of us live in.

When a great chef wants to show off his skills, he doesn’t make a fancy meal, he makes a simple omelette. It’s the simple things that are the hardest to execute perfectly, and that’s OCEAN HEAVEN. A movie about a father and his autistic son shouldn’t have this much quiet dignity. It shouldn’t be this restrained. The fact that it is, is something of a small miracle.