Stronger (2017)

David Gordon Green's Stronger arrives with the modest ambition of adapting Jeff Bauman's memoir about losing both legs at the 2013 Boston Marathon finish line, and it fulfills that ambition with a craftsman's diligence. The film is a recovery narrative, tightly focused on one man's body, one man's family, and one man's stubborn refusal to attend physical therapy. Jake Gyllenhaal spends much of the runtime in a hospital bed or a wheelchair, and the camera never flinches from the mechanics of amputation, the raw stumps, the prosthetics, the indignity of a bathtub. There is a case for reading this as a body-acceptance text, though the film keeps its gaze on personal rehabilitation and lets the broader politics of physical difference go unexamined.

The ensemble is overwhelmingly white, with one genuine exception: Carlos Sanz appears as Carlos Arredondo, the Costa Rican-born bystander who saved Bauman's life, a figure drawn from the historical record and granted real screen time. The Tsarnaev brothers hover at the edges as Chechen names in a news bulletin, never as a subject for racial or systemic inquiry. Tatiana Maslany's Erin gets to call out her boyfriend's self-pity and his mother's negligence, which is more interiority than the supportive-girlfriend template usually permits, but she remains a woman defined by her patience with a difficult man. Miranda Richardson's Patty is a study in corrosive maternal ambition, booking Oprah without asking, and the film's mild contempt for publicity culture is the closest it comes to a structural argument. It stops well short of one.

PTSD is rendered as trauma, not as identity, and the closing act drifts toward inspiration without ever mounting a podium. The result is a sincere, well-acted film that declines to lecture anyone about anything, which in this climate reads almost as a novelty. It wants only to move us, and it mostly does, unbothered by the larger questions it leaves on the table.