Ben Affleck did not give a very inspiring performance in Batman vs. Superman, but I think he more than redeemed himself in The Accountant. The movie may seem boring or run of the mill to most people: ah, look, muscley, goodlooking guy kicks ass with guns and martial arts. Yet for the millions of autistic people around the world, this movie was a real gift. Why? Because this movie gave us an autistic action hero for once.
The titular accountant, Christian Wolff, played by Ben Affleck, is an autistic savant who excels at math and puzzles. Of course, seeing that rubbed me the wrong way the first time I saw it because that's such a cliche. Not every person on the spectrum is a math genius. Yet, the cliche can be overlooked when the film goes all out in trying to portray the autistic experience. Christian gets easily overstimulated by his surroundings and can only sooth himself by listening to heavy metal and rubbing a certain texture against his leg. He has had to teach himself social skills, which is so hard for us on the spectrum. There's so many things neurotypicals (non-autistic people) take for granted as just natural transactions, such as eye contact. Autistic people are not programmed to make eye contact, so we've had to readjust ourselves to your sensibilities. Christian doesn't always "get it" though. He has trouble with idioms and figurative language, and his conversations with others are noticeably awkward, as if he doesn't quite understand the rules of the game.
Despite all this, he's a highly-trained badass. His father, a soldier, taught him to fight because he knew his son would be picked on for the way he was. The flashbacks to Christian's childhood are very hard to take in, because part of you wants to say that this all child abuse. Yet Christian is able to take on the world because of the roughness he faced in the past. He's an expert marksman, as seen when he snipes melons from miles away, and he can kill a man with his bare hands. He's like Sheldon Cooper mixed with Daredevil.
I enjoy seeing movies about characters that are explicitly on the spectrum. There are so many people on the spectrum, and yet we don't get the kind representation in media that we deserve, or if we do, it's never positive. Seeing an autistic accountant/mercenary in a film is extremely uplifting. It shows that people on the spectrum are not so different from neurotypicals and that they can play more roles than dorky sidekick.
