Chabert Watch: The Brooke Ellison Story (2004)

Watched:  05/08/2025

Format:  Tubi

Viewing:  First

Director:  Christopher Reeve

I'm gonna be straight up with y'all.  I am so grateful for a good movie at this moment in ChabertQuest 2025.  Several of the past few have been making this journey less than ideal.  

The Brooke Ellison Story (2004) is a movie I was aware of in 2004 when it came out, but completely missed as an A&E TV movie that came out during a time when I was working insane hours.  As one can guess it entered my awareness because it was directed by Christopher Reeve, who passed just two weeks before the film aired.

And, of course, once I knew about the real Brooke Ellison the film was based on, when she'd pop up in in the news every once in a while, I was reminded I'd heard of her because of the film.  But because it was a TV movie, once it was gone, it was kind of gone, so I didn't know much about it.  

The film is an adaptation of the book written by the real-life Brooke Ellison and her mother, Jean Ellison.  During her middle-school years, Brooke was hit by a car which left her a quadriplegic and living on a ventilator to survive.  She wound up going to Harvard (the thing I did know).

I didn't know, for example, that the movie stars Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and John Slattery as Brooke's parents.  But, holy smokes, is this one of those places where a movie found the right director and cast.  What could have been a saccharine movie about a family with pluck overcoming adversity manages to work because it's not about a can-do spirit and a song in your heart winning the day.  It's about the million steps you have to overcome, from regulations that make no sense, to insurance shenanigans to those who think they know best - at least at the outset. 

And the sympathy for all the characters/ family members and their role in taking on unexpected challenges - and that it is hard, and exhausting sometimes - is maybe portrayed more sanely and with more realism than I can think of in any other movie.  And that's one-part the reality of Brooke Ellison and her mother's bond, and one part Reeve's lived experience, and surely his awareness of how all of their lives changed.  Not to mention his own remarkable efforts after he was injured, and what the Reeve family did with him.

The sequence where Brooke wakes up in the hospital is incredibly powerful, and who else would know how to portray that better?

It's still a TV movie, and one from a very specific time period, so no one is going to mistake some of the production for an $80 million movie from 2004.  But it works.  In no small part because Mastrantonio is an insanely good actor, and plays her part perfectly.  And, it feels like Chabert has someone to work with as a director and scene partner.  She's really good in this, in what had to have been a taxing role.

I won't go into all the details and events of the film.  But the first half details with the incident and year of aftermath, while the second half leaps up forward to an older Brooke in high school (Chabert) as a very successful student, and then her years at Harvard.  There's very little in the way of trumped up issues.  You get the feeling that having a real story to base it on - with the authors still very much around to look over their shoulder - and a director who knew how this works, we were getting something that at least *feels* like it's based in something genuine.

Is it stupid?

No.  Not in the slightest.  There's only one scene where I think they could have rethought what they did, because it looks like a Home Depot commercial, but aside from that...

I already said I thought Chabert was really good here - as was young Vanessa Marano who played the tween-version of Brooke - and I stick by that assessment.  It's not an easy role as Chabert was confined to a chair and has only her face to work with, but it all works.  The real Ellison accomplished great things, and making the part work while not just seeming like a quadriplegic Pollyanna character* takes some nuance.  

Anyway - crazy how good material, solid fellow actors and a director who has some ideas can help make a performance better.

On a closing note, the real Brooke Ellison's story is worth checking out.  She passed just last year but accomplished a great deal, including running for office and landing a PhD and a teaching gig at Stony Brook.

*I understand the irony here as Pollyanna herself is hit by a car and loses her joie de vivre