The Fakest Parts of “Rain Man”

“Rain Man” is a rewarding film to re-watch. The acting, cinematography, and music are excellent. It’s a good story and it’s funny at times. In 1989, it won the Oscars for best picture, best screenplay, best director (Barry Levinson), and best actor (Dustin Hoffman).

“Rain Man” has some fake parts, though. For a film that won four Oscars, I’m surprised they weren’t able to weed out a few odd and distracting details. 

Charlie Babbitt’s job as a car dealer

Charlie Babbitt (played by Tom Cruise) is a Lamborghini dealer in Los Angeles. Sounds straightforward enough, right? The thing is, he doesn’t work in a sparkling showroom. He doesn’t have any inventory. He doesn’t have a service department, a parts department, or anything. The way he deals cars is quite mysterious. 

At the beginning of the movie, he’s out at the docks, supervising while a crew unloads four Lamborghinis off an enormous cargo ship. He has already sold these cars to four different buyers. 

His office consists of a couple of desks and a phone located inside a big, otherwise empty-looking warehouse. His support staff is two people, one of whom is his Italian girlfriend, Susanna (played by Valeria Golino).

Charlie took out a loan from a bank in order to acquire the Lamborghinis. His buyers have all put down cash deposits. 

A major obstacle comes up when the cars fail their emissions tests. They have carburetors and need to be converted to fuel injection systems. It’s going to cost $10,000 per car to do the conversion. 

The delay causes the buyers to change their minds. All four of them back out and demand their deposits back, leaving Charlie in the lurch and his business in dire straits. 

I don’t understand how it all works. How did Charlie find the buyers? Did he go door to door in a rich neighborhood? Did he join a country club and sell to people he played golf with? 

Did he take an ad out in the paper? “My name is Charlie Babbitt. I can get you a Lamborghini straight from Italy. Just tell me what color you want and give me a cash deposit. I will get the Lamborghini off the ship and bring it to you. Unfortunately, I am unable to offer you a test drive at this time.”

We never learn how Charlie sells the Lamborghinis.  

I also wonder about Charlie’s girlfriend, Susanna. What’s her role in the company? It doesn’t seem like she helps sell the cars. She doesn’t answer the phone or take messages (the other guy does that). Is she the contact person who knows people in Italy and acquires the vehicles? Is she an accountant? Is she a Lamborghini mechanic? We never learn what she actually does.

Finally, what about the failed emissions tests? The cars are going to require expensive engine work. Why doesn’t Charlie know about this fuel injection issue ahead of time? His lack of foresight makes it seem like this is the first time he’s ever sold a Lamborghini. Which brings us back to the original question: how did he sell these four cars in the first place? 

Charlie’s weird job as a car dealer is a glaring defect in the movie. It makes no sense. It’s a distracting detail that I think they could have fixed.

The Susanna situation

With his business imploding, Charlie drives to Palm Springs with Susanna for a romantic getaway. Why not? On the way, he gets a call on the car phone (fancy!). He learns that his father has died. The funeral is the very next day in Cincinnati. 

Charlie doesn’t want to attend because his mom died a long time ago and he hasn’t spoken to his dad in years. Susanna tells him he should go. She insists on coming along.

They attend the funeral. Before leaving town, Charlie meets with his dad’s lawyer to find out about the estate. He learns that his inheritance is nothing but an old Buick Roadmaster convertible and his father’s rose bushes. 

It turns out that Charlie has an older brother, Raymond (played by Dustin Hoffman), that he never knew existed. Raymond has inherited the rest of the $3 million estate. He’s a resident at a nearby assisted living facility for adults with special needs. 

Charlie drives out there immediately to meet his long lost brother and to see if he can get some of the inheritance money, both for the sake of fairness and to help save his failing business. 

Despite Susanna’s protests, Charlie whisks Raymond off the grounds of the facility and they hit the road in the Buick. The plan is to stay a night in a hotel and then fly to L.A. the next morning. 

At the hotel, Susanna grows increasingly frustrated with Charlie and she packs up and leaves in a rage. 

She and Charlie had a fight. It wasn’t that bad of a fight, though. She was sick of Charlie being in a bad mood and she wanted him to be nicer to his brother. 

My issue is that if you’re going to end the relationship, wouldn’t you just do it the next day when you’re back in L.A.? 

All you have to do is stay one night in the hotel. Tell Charlie to sleep on the couch. Get on the airplane the next day, and when you’re home, say goodbye and tell him to never call you again. 

Instead, she walks out the night before the flight. She sets out on her own in the Cincinnati area without a car. Presumably, to avoid Charlie, she books a different flight back to L.A. and wastes the ticket she already has. 

Susanna has every right to dump Charlie. He was acting like a jerk. (Even when he supposedly becomes a better person at the end of the movie, I think he’s still a huge jerk.) 

But her choice to walk out on him in Cincinnati makes no sense. She could have much more easily waited until the next day and dumped him in L.A.

The rapidly-filling bathtub

Just before the breakup scene in the hotel, Charlie and Susanna are under the sheets in bed together doing some hanky panky. Ray wanders into their room because the door is wide open and he wants to watch a show that’s playing on their TV. Charlie yells at him and he leaves.

Susanna tells Charlie to go talk to Ray immediately and apologize for yelling. He goes into Ray’s room, says about two sentences to him, and leaves. He’s in there for one minute, tops.

When Charlie returns to his room, he finds Susanna lounging in a bubble bath up to her neck. The tub is filled completely up to the brim. 

This is either a glaring editing error, or else some hotel in Ohio has a special bath tub spigot that unleashes 80 gallons of hot water in one minute. 

The obligatory road trip

Charlie and Raymond’s flight to L.A. never happens. In case you didn’t know, Raymond is an autistic “savant” (as a doctor in the movie later describes him) and he is able to memorize all kinds of highly detailed information. For example, he knows all about plane crash statistics. He knows which airlines have crashed, the dates of the crashes, and the number of fatalities. He goes on and on reciting plane crash information to Charlie.

He has a meltdown, he refuses to fly, and Charlie can’t get him to change his mind. They leave the airport, get back in the car, and begin driving west to L.A. Raymond is happy. 

The question is, why doesn’t Raymond know about traffic fatalities? If he’s so big on facts and figures, why doesn’t he know that highway travel is statistically much more dangerous than air travel?

My guess is that the film makers wanted to do a road trip movie, so they concocted a scenario in which the characters had to drive. They could have come up with a better rationale, though.

The Watchman TV that gets unlimited reception

The Watchman is a portable, battery powered TV. Charlie buys one while they’re on the road because Ray likes to watch “People’s Court” and “Jeopardy” every day. 

Ray’s Watchman has magical powers. It gets great reception while they’re driving through a small town. It gets great reception while they’re driving through a barren desert. It even gets great reception inside an elevator in Vegas.

My dad had a Watchman in the 80’s. We lived within five miles of several TV stations. To pick up any signal at all on the Watchman, you had to stand perfectly still and fiddle with the antenna until you got it just right. Once a clear picture came in, you couldn’t move a muscle. And you would never get reception in a moving car or an elevator.

It’s nice that Ray is able to watch Judge Wapner and “Jeopardy,” but the superb TV signal he gets on the Watchman is probably the most unrealistic aspect of the entire movie.

The film’s portrayal of a person with autism

My main questions are:

1.    Can a person with autism (or anyone) really count, within seconds, 246 toothpicks that spilled on the floor?

2.    Can a person with autism (or anyone) really do math problems as quickly as a calculator, including 5-digit multiplication?

3.    Can a person with autism (or anyone) really memorize all the numbers in a phone book up to the letter “G?”

The list goes on. I am not an expert on autism, so I won’t offer an analysis of Raymond, and whether or not he was a realistic or helpful portrayal of a person with autism. 

I have a sneaking suspicion that “Rain Man” might be a LITTLE bit off the mark, but I’ll leave it to the experts to make that judgment. 

Despite its idiosyncrasies, “Rain Man” is a worthwhile and entertaining movie. Watch it to see why it won four Oscars. Watch it for the trademark Tom Cruise jerkiness. Watch it to find out why the title is “Rain Man.” Watch it to see Susanna randomly get back together with Charlie toward the end.

One thing you won’t find out about is Charlie’s car business. Curiously, by the time he’s back in L.A., the car business is never mentioned again. His dream of selling Lamborghinis must have washed down the drain along with 80 gallons of bubble bath water in the Ohio hotel room.