Mike Kersjes (John Corbett) teaches a special ed class at a high school. He has a special group of kids with disabilities ranging from Down syndrome to the "alphabet" kind like ADHD. One day, the kids go on a field trip to a museum - and come back with pamphlets advertising Space Camp. A place for "gifted" students, Space Camp sounds like the coolest thing ever to more than one of the kids. So Mike decides to make it happen. Unfortunately, he has to 1) get his superiors to okay the trip, 2) get Space Camp to agree, 3) raise enough money, and 4) get the kids into the proper physical and especially mental state. It ain't gonna be easy.
All right, I'll just start off by saying this is a Hallmark movie. But it's so much better than one of their typical movies that I forgot it was even Hallmark. Or I would have forgotten if there weren't so many Hallmark card commercials.
Back to my review. The acting, writing, and story are amazing for a TV movie. A Smile as Big as the Moon wouldn't win any Academy Awards if it was a theater release, but it's really more than just passable. At least one of the kids is played by someone with the real disability, and the others seem to be pretty darn good actors. John Corbett is good as Mike. And that's pretty much everybody who has a big part.
So the production is good - and the story is better. People so often forget that disabilities don't define people. Yes, psychologists, I'm looking at you. Special ed kids are so often marginalized just because they happen to have difficulty reading, concentrating, remembering, or even just comprehending. They get labeled so that everyone sees them as "Down syndromes with people" (so to speak) instead of "people with Down syndrome." Then the kids' development is stunted because they're told they "can't do that" because their brains or other parts of them work differently. The only words to describe that viewpoint are ones that I prefer not to use. A Smile as Big as the Moon tears down that horrible inversion by showing just how much kids are capable of achieving if they're only given the chance and a helping hand.
My Rating: OK (mild language)
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