Title: El otro Tom
Director: Rodrigo Plá, Laura Santullo
Language: English, Spanish
Running time: 111'
How much do we really know about medication for ADHD? How much of it is really needed for children especially, and how much of it gets prescribed just to make money for Big Pharma? How does a diagnosis of ADHD in an already complicated household change things for mother and son? Is there really anything else to do? These are the questions that The other Tom (El otro Tom) wants us to ask ourselves.
Elena (Julia Chávez) is a young mother working more than one job to provide for herself and her son Tom (Israel Rodríguez), whose excited but also aggressive behaviour gets diagnosed as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Tom gets prescribed some medication to help him, but the side effects start to pile up and he gets prescribed more and more meds to help with some of them: the kid basically becomes a zombie. After an accident that deeply concerns Elena, and that the ER doctor wonders if it was caused by Tom’s medication, she decides that it’d be best if she took him off the meds. But the adults that surround her (Tom’s doctor and teachers) alert social services for her “negligence,” and as much as she tries to cooperate, she decides that she knows what’s really best for her child.
The movie basically stands on the characterisation of the two main characters. Elena becomes our central protagonist. She’s struggling to keep her life together, and we can’t really expect her to know everything about the medication her son is prescribed, it’s obvious that she’d trust the doctor. It seems absurd how many different types of medication Tom gets prescribed, the side effects pile up and he’s prescribed more meds to deal with them. We really start to wonder whether the doctor is there to do what’s best for her patient or if she’s just trying to make more money for Big Pharma. Elena is really trying her best to keep it together, but life gets in the way and she keeps breaking the promises she had made to her son. On the other hand, Tom is a child like any other, which makes him a very real character. He wants to spend more time with his mom (and his father who lives in Mexico), and it’s hard for him to understand the hardships that Elena has to go through in order to keep him with her. We get really heartbroken in what is probably the central scene of the movie: after getting taken off the meds and realising that he’s gotten back to his difficult behaviour, Tom voices his concerns that people might like the other Tom more, that Tom that was basically narcotised by the meds.
The movie has some issues, too though. It’s true that it tries to bring attention to issues like ADHD, the amount of meds people diagnosed get prescribed and the poverty of Elena and Tom’s family is going through. But it doesn’t spend enough time on any of the issues, trying to get across its point: Big Pharma is bad, our characters are just victims of it. The reality is that Elena has her faults, too: she lashes out at Tom, she fails at trying to understand him, she makes her decisions sometimes in anger, and while she thinks she’s doing what’s best, she fails to see that Tom would just like to spend some quality time with her. These aspects get shoved to the side, while also keeping the ADHD diagnosis in the back, and the movie loses a bit of its strength. The almost two hours length of the movie also doesn’t help, as its rhythm is quite slow and allows us for quite some time to get distracted.
Unfortunately, it seems like what the directors were trying to do was makes us see both sides of the coin, but what we really get is just the fact that Big Pharma is all bad and out to get you, and leaves out the context in which the movie takes place. It is a good movie to bring attention to the issues, but rather than start a conversation about them, it seems to put and end to it.
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