Grab your life preservers and sunscreen, because it’s BOATS (Based On A True Story) time! Lucca’s World (now on Netflix) is a Mexican drama about a young boy with pediatric cerebral palsy, and the mother who all but moved the earth with her bare hands to give him a better life. It’s based on the memoir by Barbara Anderson, who detailed her family’s journey to India for an experimental treatment that seemed to be her son’s only hope. So what we’ve got here is a story that’s a little bit sad and a little bit inspirational and is quite the emotional rollercoaster – as you no doubt wholly expect it to be.
The Gist: Ten minutes. That’s the interval of Barbara’s (Barbara Mori) contractions. She and anxious dad-to-be Andres (Juan Pablo Medina) waddle up to the ER desk and are told to go home and come back when she’s at five minutes – and then her water breaks. Excellent timing, water! We’re subject to the usual wailing-mother PUSH-breathe-PUSH-breathe movie birth scene, but then it goes dark. Barbara awakens to learn that baby Lucca is in an incubator, in an induced coma with brain swelling. In diary-style voiceover, Barbara shares that Lucca suffered irreversible brain damage, and that he may never have the capacity to recognize his own mother.
Now, several years later, Lucca (Julian Tello) has a younger brother, Bruno (Samuel Perez). Barbara writes for a magazine. Andres is unemployed and job hunting. Barbara and Andres juggle daycare drop-offs and this therapy for Lucca and that therapy for Lucca and employ a full-time nanny-nurse, Naye (Paloma Alvamar), and bathtime requires Barbara to don a bathing suit and get in the tub with Lucca. Then everyone falls asleep exhausted in a pile while Lucca sleeps surrounded by pillows at the end of his parents’ bed. Barbara can’t forget how she couldn’t push one more time during Lucca’s birth, and she blames herself for his condition. She therefore works and works and works and works to make up for what she perceives to be her own failing, but is more likely unfortunate circumstance. But this is how the human psyche tends to work, especially in movies, where black-and-white notions are far simpler to convey than complicated internal conflicts.
Lucca’s condition means he has frequent epileptic seizures, which means everyone’s all too familiar with the hospital. Barbara sleeps in the chair next to Lucca’s hospital bed then drags herself to interview a source for a magazine story, which turns into kismet: The interviewee knows a guy who knows a doctor in India who’s developing an experimental treatment designed to stimulate brain cells. It’s worked to shrink tumors and reestablish fractured brain-cell connections, but has yet to be approved by most governments. Barbara bites on it. Andres is skeptical. They have to trust unvetted strangers and fly halfway around the world, a risk considering Lucca’s condition. And of course it’s expensive, and of course they’re already deep in debt, and of course they have to mortgage the house to afford it. But saying no to a desperate mother seems like an unwise choice, doesn’t it?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Recent Disney+ dramedy Out of My Mind tells a similar story from the perspective of a teenage girl whose cerebral palsy has rendered her unable to speak; it’s more lively and slightly less conventional than Lucca’s World.
Performance Worth Watching: Mori is tasked with emotionally and pragmatically anchoring a screenplay that’s a sloppy around the edges, and is absolutely up for it. Her performance is strong enough to push the film just outside forgettable territory.
Memorable Dialogue: A tense moment in India, when Lucca is hospitalized after suffering another seizure:
Barbara: What if he dies, Andres?
Andres: It’s been a possibility since the day he was born. Yet here we are.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Very, very roughly, movies tend to fall into three categories: challenging art, escapist entertainment and inspirational stories. Some fall between the cracks or straddle sensibilities, and those tend to be more extraordinary. Some bullseye their classification, which is where Lucca’s World enters the conversation. It doesn’t nurture provocative subtext like stimulating art, and it’s not so crass as to render a story rooted in human suffering as cheap stimulation. No, it’s BOATS and it’s earnest, which drops it into that third camp, where it aims to adhere reasonably close to reality and remind us of the power and fortitude of the human spirit. It’s not journalism, but it functions similarly – real people did this thing that you might not realize could be done, things got better for them, and maybe you could do the same!
Even in their most hacky and rudimentary form – remember TV movies of the week? – films about these events are moving and inspiring; a child suffered great misfortune, and a combination of his mother’s persistence and new advancements in medical science resulted in significant improvement of his quality of life. If you don’t at the very least relate to the core sentiment, you’re a robot. Read into it a little, and it’s pretty much a story about creating your own luck. Read into it more, and you won’t find much else. There’s the nagging feeling that healthcare systems are deeply flawed and subject to exploitation by bad actors, but the movie uses this dramatic device as a half-realized, tossed-in third-act conflict. A conversation among Lucca’s family and his doctor addresses the word “miracle,” and the scientist in the room flyweight-wrestles with notions about where god and science differ and intersect. That’s Intro to Philosophy 101, first day of class.
So the question here isn’t whether we’re moved by Lucca’s story, but about craft and execution. Yanking a heartstring or two is shooting fish in a barrel, but acting, writing, editing, cinematography and all that are more difficult to piece together coherently, and play significant roles in rendering a film relatable and consumable. Lucca’s World meets the median standard, with Mori’s performance elevating the proceedings a bit – despite the flimsiness of Barbara’s guilt-ridden character arc – and the choppy flow, which pushes the movie into the realm of detail-needy shorthand in the third act, brings it down a little. It all evens out, though, and is an ever-so-slightly above-average drama that might inform laypeople that a thing called a Cytotron exists, and may be a breakthrough in medical science. And that’s why this pretty good, slightly forgettable movie exists.
Our Call: Lucca’s World is a very watchable, gently flawed inspirational drama. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
