282 - Molly

Your Stupid Minds returns from a brief summer sojourn to cover a movie that MGM had so little faith in, it premiered as an in-flight movie a month before theaters. It's 1999's Molly, starring Elisabeth Shue, Aaron Eckhart, Jill Hennessy, and Thomas Jane. Molly (Shue) is a woman with what seems to be autism, but kind of presents as whatever the movie needs it to do. The institution where she's lived for decades is closing down, so her brother Buck (Eckhart) must take her home to his trendy '90s Venice Beach loft. He considers this a huge imposition, and after she ruins his big advertising presentation, he's determined to "fix" her. A new institution has developed an experimental surgery. They can't diagnose her exact condition, but they sure can try to fix it! The cause of autism, as this movie would assume, is a red blob in her brain. If they can make the blob smaller, then her brain can work better, or something. With the help of another intellectually disabled orderly from her old institution Sam (Jane), as well as Drs. Brookes (Hennessy) and Trehare (Elizabeth Mitchell), the procedure is a success and Molly begins speaking and performing new tasks. She embraces her manic pixie dream girl status to start dating Sam, go to a Dodgers game, crash a cool vampire production of Romeo and Juliet, and generally start enjoying life. But, since we are pulling a lot of the plot from Flowers for Algernon, something is wrong and she begins regressing. Are they able to reverse the regression? Can Buck stop being such a jerk? Will we all learn valuable lessons about ability and disability, family, and accepting yourself? You'll have to listen to find out!