three things

1. There are several irritating things in this film, as in most films. Here, it's the Hollywood view of the flyover states, although that's redeemed to a large extent by having Charlie be snarky and arrogant about it, which is to say, the audience is supposed to see the sense of the film as not smirking about the flyovers. (For the record, I'm from L.A. and still have quite a few relatives and friends on the West Coast, but went to high school and college in West Texas and Missouri. Come to think of it, I also taught at universities in Utah and New Mexico. So kind of all over.)

For instance: Almost any nurse in almost any small town in 1988 was going to know what autism was.

And: There aren't too many broken-down, 1950s-style gas stations with the lever-operated pumps. By 1988 -- really, by at least a decade before that -- most gas stations along any of those routes were the typical quick-stop convenience stores and big truck stops, with a few old-style stations from the '60s and '70s here and there.

Also: Of course the woman at the farmhouse has a million kids, some of them with mullets. And she's an Alabaman (the actress, I mean), which continues the tradition of the One Big Southern Accent problem in films (which can include, for instance, even small-town sheriffs in the California desert -- the more crooked and/or stupid they are, the more likely they are to have a generic Southern accent). In real life, of course, there's a dramatic difference between a Deep South accent and a mid-South, and a mid-South and a West Texas, and a West Texas and an East Texas.

But again, the film makes up for it in other ways. For instance, the small-town doctor -- whose business really isn't to know anything about autism in the first place -- actually does know something about it and gets somewhere with Ray.

2. I saw this film probably four times, at least, before I could get past the "it's Hoffman it's Hoffman it's Hoffman" thing. Not his fault. Just a fact that when you pick a first-level star like him, he's going to bring all kinds of baggage into the movie with him. It's going to be hard to see the character when the character is this unusual and the actor has a long-established persona. But somewhere around the fourth or fifth time I saw it, it seemed less and less like him. What he did with the character was really good in almost every scene at almost every moment. Very few exceptions. If you've had the same problem with Hoffman in the role, give it enough time, it'll get there for you.

3. The film stands up remarkably well to repeated viewing, and not only because of Valeria Golino. It's because it's not some kind of buddy movie with a twist, or a Cruise vehicle, or a comedy about the funny autistic guy with some good one-liners, or any of the things people thought it was. At heart it's about what it is to love somebody in a completely unselfish way, when you have no idea what is or is not coming back, and you have to love that person exactly as he or she is, knowing it's unlikely he/she will ever change. In case anybody's paying attention, that has very wide application. Like, universal. It so happens in this case that the person is autistic, but that's just an extended or somewhat more extreme example of the kind of inner world that pretty much every human is locked into in one way or another. In the end, this is really what love is -- all directed at the other, with nothing necessarily coming back and nothing to gain, for nothing but the pure good of it. The film is so much more than it seems on the surface.