Black Balloon (2008)***+

Seen on 24-9-2009 - Sony Pix
Cast: Rhys Wakefield (Thomas Mollison), Luke Ford (Charlie Mollison), Gemma Ward (Jackie)
Dir. : Elissa Down
This Australian film has won 15 awards & 23 Nominations. We saw this without subtitles and couldn't appreciate fully the nuances of situations.
But it was clear that the film is about gradual acceptance by the normal brother of the responsibility for his autistic younger brother. There is a moral growth in the normal brother which is adds weight to the film.
This recalls the movie, What's Eating Gilbert Garpe where De Caprio played the autistic brother, while Johnny Depp did the other one. In both the acting and script is superb, but somehow we seem to have liked the Depp starrer. Surprisingly in both the films, the normal brother would have gone it alone to tend to their brothers, even if their girl-friends too hadn't accepted their life-long responsibility. But as it happens in both the films, they take the whole package.
But Black Balloon differenciates itself by presenting a boy initially balks at the situation, but gradually changes and accepts what's hard-to-accept. Where as Garpe is endowed with a temperament to accept not simply the responsibility of his brother, but of unmarried sisters and of his poor impossibly fat mother. This makes the Australian movie better.