I saw it yesterday and *loved* it. Very well-done. And yes, Gordon-Levitt is wonderful. I really believed his frustration in not being able "to get the sequencing right." It wasn't a showy, check-out-this-speech-pattern-I-came-up-with, hey-I'm-disabled-award-me-now kind of performance. It was very subtle. I've actually known people who've had serious head injuries in car crashes and were in comas - one for six weeks before she came out of it. They all had to learn to walk and talk and write all over again. And they all were never the same. I appreciated that this movie didn't show us Chris Pratt's recovery, but only hinted at how painstaking and difficult it must have been by the glimpse of the wheelchair folded up in his room that his Mom kept "just the way it was when he was a boy" and the scars only flashed to us on his forehead, back, and neck. All very real, very believable. And Jeff Daniels was wonderful, *wonderful*. I hate showy "Blind Guy" performances most of all. But I actually believed he was Lewis and that he was blind. He's really the first actor I've ever seen play blind that I actually believed, come to think of it.
What I liked the most about it was, as you said, the character development. Each character, even the baddie Gary and the dimbulb Luvlee, was multi-layered. And neither of those two was without his or her own disability - as Gary said as he took a hit off the inhaler, "We all got our problems." (To me, his was asthma, and hers was very low intelligence.) Not a single character was flawless. And not a one was utterly without any redeeming features, either. (Well, except "Bones," but at least he never spoke. Actually, I think he was the only flaw in the whole story.)
I also loved the relationship between Lewis and Chris. It was much more subtlely done than it usually is, but Lewis was clearly the father Chris didn't have - someone who believed in him and taught him by example. Didn't you love the way Lewis talked to the lady named Kathy who called 1-800-Flowers? He talked to everyone that way - like they were the most special human being ever conceived. Well, not to Luvlee, because he was onto her.
Shoot, the more I think about it, the more I think I might go watch it again next weekend. That's a first in, oh, about a year.
Saw another good one today - "The Last Mimzy." Actually quite a bit better than I expected. Very nice parable, and any movie that takes a liberal shot at The Patriot Act is a friend of mine. Timothy Hutton's aging quite nicely, besides. I think he's more attractive now than he used to be.
