Your ability to comfortably watch Hinckley – I Shot The President will be directly related to your ability to believe in redemption. Not the easy kind of redemption where a minor sin is undone by a kind act or gesture but the difficult kind where you have to look deep inside yourself to see past the evil deeds that can be done by the mentally ill.
John Warnock Hinckley Jr. was born to a wealthy family in Ardmore, Oklahoma and enjoyed that privilege to live a pleasant and incident-free childhood but under that facade of normalcy lay a fragile psyche. That he lived in a country that didn’t prioritise mental health and made guns as easy to buy as the local paper set him on a course of impending trouble.
Hinckley wandered through life until obsession took over his thought process. The 1976 Martin Scorsese film Taxi Driver with its anti-hero Travis Bickle played by Robert De Niro became an inspiration. In the film Bickle sets out to save the young prostitute Iris played by Jodie Foster, in Hinckley’s mind this sets out his life’s task and his obsession with Foster becomes all-consuming.
The story is told by Hinckley himself and after decades of incarceration in a mental hospital, years of professional help and a strong medication regime he comes across as a man in control of his demons. If there is empathy in your heart, you can not help but feel for this poor man who has suffered more than most. That he now lives in relative peace and safety only adds to the fascination of this story.
Rob Hudson
Glass Engine will release the film HINCKLEY: I SHOT THE PRESIDENT on its own platform Launchpad: www.hinckley.movie
