DAN WEBSTER:
In his 2018 Netflix comedy special Tom Segura: Disgraceful, the comedian tells a story about an incident he witnessed as a fifth-grader.
It was his first day at a new Catholic school, and he found himself attending morning mass along with the rest of his new schoolmates. As the priest began his prayer, a student sitting in front of Segura yelled out a profanity.
Being who he is, Segura began to laugh—not just at what the boy had done but even more so at the fact that no one, not even the priest, reacted.
Laughing so hard that he could hardly breathe, Segura couldn’t believe why no one else was joining in. Then the boy sitting next to him said, “He has Tourette’s. It gets old.”
John Davidson likely would agree. For much of his life, little about his experience with Tourette’s has struck him as remotely funny.
Davidson was the centerpiece of a 1989 BBC documentary titled John’s Not Mad, which focuses on his experiences as a 16-year-old with Tourette’s, a neurological disorder in which those with it, like Davidson, exhibit a range of tics such as blinking, throat-clearing, facial movements and—in the rare case—profane verbal outbursts.
Davidson now is the protagonist of I Swear, a narrative film by British writer-director Kirk Jones that attempts to capture dramatically what Davidson experienced while growing up in a small Scottish town. Played both by Robert Aromayo as an adult and Scott Ellis Watson as a teen, Jones’s film version of Davidson transforms him from an average young boy with a talent for soccer into a virtual social pariah.
We watch as his symptoms grow ever more apparent, and disruptive, making him a target of his fellow students, especially the bullies. School officials call him out, accusing him of begging for attention and punishing him with the kind of treatment involving a belt that used to be all too common.
His parents, too, struggle to deal with his behavior. It seems to have been at least part of the reason why their marriage ended in divorce. Eventually, Davidson’s overstressed mother (played by an icy Shirley Henderson), forces him to eat his meals away from his siblings, facing a fireplace because his tics cause him to spit out his food.
Much of I Swear keys on the fact that, in the 1980s, people understood little about Tourette’s, including—and maybe especially—professionals in the fields of medicine and psychology. Jones emphasizes as well how, among other problems, Davidson’s disorder caused him at various times both to be severely beaten and even taken to court.
One person who did have compassion for Davidson was the mother of a childhood friend, a woman named Dottie Achenbach (played by Maxine Peake), who had worked as a mental health nurse.
It is through Dottie and Tommy Trotter (a community-center caretaker played by Peter Mullan) that Davidson finds some understanding. Through them he lands a job and, eventually, a role as someone who would teach the general public about what Tourette’s is and what can be done about it—as little as that might be.
As with all such based-on-real-events movies, at least some of I Swear has been dramatized for effect. But much of it apparently happened, including Davidson’s MBE award ceremony in which he uttered something involving Queen Eizabeth and, uh, carnal activity.
Jones flirts at times with a bit too much sentimentality. But he also includes several scenes that—thanks largely to the acting skill of both Aromayo (who won a BAFTA award for his efforts) and Ellis Watson—do capture Davidson’s experiences in a manner that gives I Swear a more balanced feel.
In any event, it’s always good to see a movie that has a heart, especially when that heart is set firmly in the right place.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio.
