‘Being Heumann’ review: ‘CODA’ director returns with warm but generic disability rights movie

When 2021’s “CODA” steamrolled toward the end of the award season all the way to a best picture Oscar win, the feat was surprising at the time. But in retrospect, not so much.

Audiences back then were craving movies that made them feel good instead of pretentious and depressed. And comfort is “CODA” director Sian Heder’s comfort zone.

She proves as much again with “Being Heumann,” a warm if generic disability rights story that had its world premiere Thursday at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Based on a real 1977 protest, a group of scrappy underdog activists led by the indomitable Judy Heumann stage a 28-day sit-in — one of many across the USA — to demand the government finally enforce a 1973 law forbidding discrimination on the basis of disability. 

That would require the sign-off on the final regulations by the squirmy United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano (Mark Ruffalo, fine). 

The head of HEW hems and haws because giving the go-ahead means costly ramps and elevators would need to be added to inaccessible buildings. And fast. But Heumann and Co. are so determined to get Section 504 signed, about 150 of them storm the Federal Building in San Francisco and make camp. At one point they go on a hunger strike. 

That’s ripe territory for Heder’s greatest gifts: building ensembles and encouraging genuine playfulness. They’re taken full advantage of once the righteous ragers are locked up in their raucous faux-tel. The characters have wheelchair races down the hallway and refashion a bathroom into a hair salon. There’s a sex tent that they call… “the sex tent.” 

What gets in the director’s way is her tendency to fall into the beat-by-beat conventions of historical storytelling. “Heumann” feels like too many other us-against-the-man movies to the point of being soothing rather than galvanizing. Thus it comes across as rather less weighty than “CODA” did, and hardly cathartic, even though that one was about a working-class family of four — not a consequential political movement of thousands. 

Compounding the eerie calm is the seventies setting being visualized in a totally unconvincing way. Sure, there are the retro clothes and the old cars. But we are never once believably transported to that decade, which sands down the edges more. 

“Heumann” winds up important and nice, but often curiously uninvolving.

If we are roused, it’s usually because British actress Ruth Madeley is giving a scorcher of a speech as Heumann, a brilliant spitfire who became wheelchair-bound after contracting polio as a child. In one of her first, right before she incites the crowd to flood the government office, she describes how all her life she’s been called a “fire hazard” — in job interviews, on airplanes, everywhere. She says now is the time for that to stop.

You’ll recognize Heumann, funny and full of energy, if you’ve seen the better documentary “Crip Camp,” which also partly recounts this inspiring event. Madeley ideally captures her wit, charisma and ferocity. No elected official wanted to be on the opposite end of a phone call with Judy, and I’m sure they’d feel the same way about Madeley.

If the title didn’t clue you in, this telling focuses the protest around Judy. That makes sense since she was the organizer, a Larry Kramer type. Yet it’s also a missed opportunity. We only fleetingly get to learn anything about her compatriots beyond their disabilities and reveling. 

Even Dylan O’Brien as a young TV news reporter whose motivations are never made clear gets more screen time than most. The supporting cast manages to make their mark anyway with thin material, especially Michael Patrick Thornton and Andrew Pilkington. 

That’s why the most moving scene of the film is during a hearing on 504 — a montage in which many characters rapidly illuminate the hardships in their lives as disabled citizens in a country that won’t accommodate them. We finally start to feel something.

Fun though the sex tent is, “Being Heumann” needed more of that.