Fundamentals of Caring

08/26/17

            This week, I decided to check out a Netflix original movie, as I haven’t done so before and am generally more of a movie person. I was drawn to Fundamentals of Caring, most likely because the picture for this movie is of waffles and sausage and (although they are arranged to look like male genitalia) I love breakfast food so I thought I’d check it out. Just from reading the description, it sounded like one of those really basic movies about a road trip, but the big thing that excited me about it was that Selena Gomez was in it and I am so high key obsessed with her.

The movie follows a retired writer named Ben (Paul Rudd) who is now looking to find a job in the field of caregiving and even takes a class called, you guessed it, “The Fundamentals of Caring.” He winds up getting hired by a woman named Elsa whose eighteen-year-old son Travis has muscular dystrophy. It all sounds pretty run of the mill and boring so far, but Travis happens to be an extremely sarcastic and narcissistic, and quite frankly a prick. He is super routine oriented and hates to change even the most miniscule details about the way he lives. He eats the exact same thing every meal(where the waffles and sausage picture on the front cover comes about), goes to the park once a week with a very precise time perimeter, and for the most part sits around his house watching TV all hours of the day. Ben, trying to break Trevor’s routine and give him unforgettable memories, suggests that they go on a road trip across America, viewing some of the lamest roadside attractions along the way. After much planning and reluctance, the trip finally happens. There are many ups and downs along the way, they end up picking up two more passengers (Dot, Selena Gomez’s character, and a pregnant woman), and there are challenges that come along with travelling so far with someone with muscular dystrophy. The turning point of the movie happens when Trevor tells Ben he wants to make a pitstop to see his father who abandoned him at the age of three (also happens to be the age he was diagnosed, a little fishily), and basically the asshole tries to pay off his guilt by giving Trevor money. I wanted to throw my laptop at that part, that’s for sure. Anyway, the trip ends with their big final destination, which is the World’s Deepest Pit, and (spoiler) the pregnant woman goes into labor at the bottom of the pit and Ben has to deliver the baby as the ambulance isn’t able to get there in time.

Honestly, now that I think of it there wasn’t a lot to this movie, but it had a ton of cool twists in it, some that I didn’t even mention. I also enjoyed a lot of the quotes from it, my favorite definitely being, “I’m getting a patty melt, I don’t give a shit.” (Paul Rudd) Another really cool element to me was the fact that the main character has muscular dystrophy, and just trying to make connections with that from what I learned about MD last year in my comm dis intro course. From what I remembered, a lot of it was really accurate, although most people who suffer from muscular dystrophy also have language deficits, but for the sake of this movie I think it made more sense that Trevor didn’t. All in all, I really loved this movie a lot, and it’s one that I will probably force a lot of my friends to watch because I think it’s one everyone should see.