A car firm, a funeral, and a garden instead of three million

Rain Man, in these notes, is an American film about a younger brother who first approaches his older brother, a man with autism and a startling memory, in order to take an inheritance, and who slowly comes to feel a brother’s love. Barry Levinson directs. Dustin Hoffman plays the older brother, Tom Cruise the selfish younger one.

Charlie, the notes say, runs a car company. He has an order for a new model, barely talks the contractors round, and leaves on holiday with his girlfriend, Susanna, as the notes spell her. Mid-holiday he hears that his father has died. At the funeral he wonders whether three million dollars might come to him. What he can take, they say, is only an old car and a rose garden. He looks for who received the rest, and finds that it is Raymond, his brother, who lives by a regular schedule and remembers almost more than seems possible.

A trip toward a lawyer, and a childhood name that comes back

Charlie’s debts keep growing. He wants at least half of what Raymond will receive, and sets out to take him to a lawyer in Los Angeles. Susanna opposes the plan, and looks at Raymond with sympathy. Charlie, the notes say, suffers through the journey to keep his brother at ease, and in the episodes of that forced travel he remembers that Raymond was the “Rain Man” of his childhood.

He then uses Raymond’s gift for memory to make a sudden fortune in a casino. The notes do not add a city name beyond that. Afterward Charlie no longer looks, in the writer’s reading, like a man only after the estate; he wants to love his brother in earnest and to become a real guardian. In Los Angeles they sit a hearing-style examination. Charlie says the question is no longer the money, but a warmth between brothers.

What the notes claim about the condition, and a close that would not sweeten

The illness the older brother has, the notes say, is autism, arising from a congenital biological difference. EEG, CT, and MRI often show unusual findings, they write, and if a sibling has autism the chance for another is, in this essay, more than fifty times higher; that figure is the writer’s claim, left in the notes’ window. Most people with autism, the notes say, also have an intellectual disability, and speech and daily life alone are often hard; yet about thirty percent, they add, can learn on their own. Raymond, with his extraordinary memory, is placed by the writer in that group and called high-functioning. That does not make him a genius, the notes warn: copying, remembering, and finding a pattern may be strong, while invention is not. The deepest trouble, they say, is a lack of social feeling, and the most common sign is not meeting another person’s eyes.

The writer was first angry at Charlie, and could not understand a younger brother who seemed to use a disability for money. They had hoped the two might go on smiling together, but the close in which Charlie, sorry to see Raymond sent back to the hospital, leaves a longer aftertaste. The same Korean essay, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Rain Man, as the notes name the film, dir. Barry Levinson

Last updated: 14 November 2026