Okay, I understand (from firsthand experience) how hard it is to see a family member change into a completely different, impaired person due to a traumatic brain injury. But did they really have to unload all their grievances onto a vulnerable, damaged man with such viciousness?
shareI didn't think they were particularly vicious. They were grieving the loss of the man they knew. And they were imperfect...as humans tend to be. I found Alan's parents particularly smarmy though. Getting all high and mighty with his wife because she wants to bail on him...when he bailed on both HER and their kid all those years ago. The kettle's parents calling the pot black, I'd say.
shareI'll admit that I have absolutely no first hand experience and I couldn't possibly begin to understand how difficult it would be to deal with that type of situation but I found his family didn't really seem to try very hard to understand what he was going through. I'm not saying his wife didn't try to help him I just found that they didn't get that he wasn't acting like that on purpose to mess up their lives, he couldn't help it. They seemed to blame him for something he couldn't just magically fix. I wanted to punch almost every character at one point or another during the movie.
Yeah, that happened to me when I was watching the movie too. It was like his family tought everything he did was on purpose or like he wasn't trying...
"Bring me the finest muffins and bagels in all the land"
It is very, very hard to wrap your head around the fact that the person you love cannot do or be what they used to, or that the change in them may be permanent. This is very true of head injuries but of other injuries as well. Any chronic condition cannot help but change relationship dynamics.
And while we can understand with our intellect why this has happened, our hearts and souls don't want to understand it - you just want the loved one to be as they were before. What's more, the loved one wants to be back to "normal" too, even if they can't understand how or why life has changed.
Such life changes force one to go through a grief process much like death does. It takes time to get to acceptance, and there will always be days when you still can't accept, when you still resent it. But you keep going as best you can - as this man and his family were getting to by the end.