Arthur Penn: New Edition

The Chase

The Miracle Worker Of all Penn’s films, The Miracle Worker is the most direct, the least ambiguous, in emotional effect, and this has led many people, quite understandably, to regard it as a comparatively simple, minor work and not inquire into it too deeply. (On the lowest level, there is an inbuilt intellectual tendency to distrust a film that makes one cry so much.) This directness of effect is certainly no illusion, but it conceals a great underlying complexity. The extent to which one becomes aware of this depends partly on where one feels the center of interest in the film to lie: in Helen Keller or in Annie Sullivan. The spectacle of the deaf and blind child struggling to burst out of her imprisonment is so moving, and the performance of Patty Duke so extraordinary, that—despite the fact that Anne Bancroft’s performance is at least equally extraordinary—it is easy to focus attention on the recipient of the promised miracle rather than on its worker. A true reading of the film must, I think, start from the parallels insisted on, partly in the dialogue, partly visually, between the two. About halfway through the film, Annie Sullivan looks out of the window to see Helen, arms outstretched, face uplifted, groping her way toward the house. Dissolve into one of Annie’s memories that punctuates the action: she, in the horrific almshouse for the mentally and otherwise defective, gropes her way from the dim, gesticulating shapes of madwomen toward a group of officials and cries out to them, “I want to go to school.” As the image dissolves back to Helen, the two blindly groping figures are briefly superimposed: in Helen, Annie recognizes herself. The Miracle Worker 23 Not only the connection it makes but the whole emotional power of the image is central to the film. The real subject of The Miracle Worker is not deafness or blindness, or even, centrally, teaching or communication, but the life principle itself: the way in which life energies , if they are sufficiently insistent, can drive through all barriers and obstacles to force an outlet, whatever harm is done them on the way. And Annie is at least as central to Penn’s development of this theme (“movement” is perhaps a better word) as Helen. In Helen the movement is more obvious, and it is through her that the overwhelming immediate effect of the film is made. The penultimate sequence, in which Helen at last realizes the connection between finger-spelled words and the objects they indicate, constitutes one of the most moving affirmations in the history of the cinema. What is conveyed is above all the ecstasy of suddenly breaking through frustrations to the potential fulfillment of the most fundamental of human appetites— the appetite to know, to express, to communicate, the very principle of creativity. The Helen we see at the end of the film may still be deaf and blind, but she seems almost the least handicapped of Penn’s protagonists : less, certainly, than Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. She has, indestructibly, the desire for fullness of life concentrated within her by the years of total darkness in an unusually pure and uncorrupted form. Like Annie in her prison, the experience has made Helen “strong.” And the strength, one feels, has been bought at less terrible cost: the Helen Keller whom Penn shows us (it will be understood, I hope, that I am concerned here with the film as an autonomous work, not with its fidelity or otherwise to what really happened) has it in her to be a more complete human being than Annie Sullivan will ever be. We are moved in this sequence by more than Helen’s or Annie’s personal triumph: by the communicated intense joy in life. Camera movement and editing involve the spectator to the maximum in Helen ’s ecstasy; we turn from the film with a renewed delight in and wonder at our own existence. Especially, there is the use of the simple and basic symbolism of water and earth and the keys. Helen’s breakthrough happens when 24 robin wood the water from the pump runs over one hand as her other hand is held in Annie’s: physical sensation and consciousness (the finger-spelling) are suddenly fused, becoming all but interchangeable. From water Helen passes to soil—understood, then rubbed ecstatically on the face—and from soil...