Parker Smith and Spencer Cook lived together, Smith working as Cook’s caregiver, for several years before they decided to collaborate on a film. “Act of God” grew out of the pair’s “mutual recognition of the strangeness of our life together,” Cook wrote.
The film’s protagonist, Stuart, longs to be not only independent and self-sufficient but also rich.
In “Act of God,” a short film written and directed by Spencer Cook and Parker Smith, a man named Stuart sees a hundred-dollar bill on a sidewalk during his morning commute. He can’t maneuver his wheelchair to pick up the money, so he continues on to the office. On the way home, Stuart spots the bill again, and this time he is determined not to give up so easily.
But the struggle that matters in Stuart’s life isn’t his quest to impale a bit of wayward currency. Rather, it is a type of challenge recognizable to almost anyone: he needs a certain kind of help and has a hard time accepting it. Cook, who lives in Austin, Texas, and is an artist and a disability activist in addition to being a filmmaker, told me in an e-mail that “caregiving is a difficult job, as is accepting that care gracefully.
But Stuart does have to rely on “them”—especially his new caregiver, the bumbling but affable Paul, played with a light comic touch by Tinus Seaux. In an e-mail, Smith said that Paul “is essentially playing an improved version of myself—better hair, cooler glasses, friendlier, more patient.” Whether it is possible—for Stuart and for viewers—to see that relationship as a source of meaning and connection, not merely a necessary arrangement, is the central question of the film.
In the course of our Q. & A., I asked Cook and Smith what question I should be asking them that I wasn’t thinking of. Cook’s reply was especially illuminating. The question to ask, he wrote, is: “Who pays for Stuart’s care? And the answer is: Medicaid, the program that many politicians dream of cutting into oblivion. Though it’s certainly not perfect, I wouldn’t be able to live without it.
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