Regarding Henry (1991)

Powerful

Absolutely brilliant

Blistering performances.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Henry Turner (Harrison Ford) is a ruthless arrogant lawyer. His wife Sarah (Annette Bening) is more concerned about appearance. Their daughter Rachel suffers quietly as the family rots from the inside. Henry is shot during a convenience store robbery. It leaves him with severe brain injury. Physical therapist Bradley (Bill Nunn) tries to help him recover. Along the way, he discovers some dark things about his life and tries to fix his family.Henry is obviously annoying at the beginning. The most annoying part is when he starts berating the store robber. It's pushed too far. Then it tries to be a loving tribute to brain injuries. It's a fantastical fantasy where Henry's diminished capacity leads to redemption and salvation. That is also as annoying.More specifically, there are a couple of other problems. The guy is barely able to read and yet he figures out the one important piece of evidence in a stack of files. There is a way to save it if the daughter helps him and together they find the clue. The Ritz cracker is a horrible idea. Henry's injuries are way too severe for this movie to make sense. It's also way too cute wrapping everything up.I can excuse Mike Nichols because the acting is pretty good. He is most known for getting great actors to do good work. Indeed, Harrison Ford does good work. The writing from J. J. Abrams is horrendous. The story is completely misguided. There may be a way into the story by making the wife Sarah as the main character. The movie needs a giant rewrite.

This is possibly the worst movie about traumatic brain injury (TBI) ever made. As a former speech therapist who worked with children and adults recovering from TBI I was appalled at the lack of apparent research in preparation for the film. Nichols and Ford were so far off the mark it was embarrassingly silly. Example: For person recovering language it's a bad idea to swamp them with so much language that all words become a meaningless string of sounds. It's the same as dropping a non-swimmer in the ocean knowing all that water is going to teach him to swim. The physical therapist was probably the worst and any self respecting speech therapist would've told him to be quiet. The plot is simple predictable and unmoving.why this director would take these actors and toss them into a dramatic ocean and expect them to swim without direction is as silly as their depiction of recovering from TBI.

Regarding HenryWho needs memories when we have thousands of photographs of every event in our lives stored on our computers?Still, the memory loss suffer in this drama would like to regain his recall.Forgetting his cold-heartedness after being shot in the head during a convenient store robbery, high-powered attorney Henry (Harrison Ford) finds himself relying on his neglected wife (Annette Bening) and distant daughter for the first-time in his selfish life.Initially unaware of his former foulness, Henry forges new relationships with both women.When his past becomes clearer, however, he starts to see the flaws in his former existence and sets out to right them. Handcrafted to evoke feels of sentimentality, this J.J. Abrams scripted redemption tale relies too heavily on feel-good father-daughter moments and Dickensian epiphanies to progress its engaging but predictable narrative.Incidentally, the best person to jog an amnesiac's memory is someone who owes them money.Yellow Lightvidiotreviews.blogspot.ca

As one other reviewer had said, this should have won an Oscar and I think it is highly underrated on IMDb. I have seen this movie a couple of times, but the last time I saw it, it had a different feel. I had just seen personally a family member undergo physiotherapy and also loss of memory... I could empathize with how Annette Bening felt and the performance of Harrison Ford was spot on. Some beautiful moments during the movie, like when he speaks his first words during recovery, when learning to read. The change in Henry's character is the major theme of the movie and how it affects the rest of the family has been well portrayed. The two contrasting worlds of Henry finally collide when he is forced to confront who he was. I felt the movie was a wonderful journey. More an under appreciated classic, I highly recommend it.