Emmanuel's Gift
It's a tribute to Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah that he survives being sanctified in ''Emmanuel's Gift" and emerges with strength, charisma, and humanity intact. Directed in the breathless inspirational tones of an infomercial, the film's an acceptable document of a thoroughly remarkable individual.
Yeboah had the bad luck to be born with a deformed leg in Ghana, where being disabled is worse than bad karma and slightly less than a sin. Disease and lack of health care have resulted in 10 percent of the country's population born with disabilities; the ones not abandoned at birth are treated as second-class citizens and forced to beg in the streets.
Yeboah said no. A brass-tacks self-motivator, he taught himself to ride a bicycle one-legged and pedaled 380 miles across Ghana to raise awareness of what people like him can do. Along the way he became a star, with his progress reported in the media and the entire country rooting for him.
This is where Lisa Lax and Nancy Stern's film properly begins. The folks at San Diego's Challenged Athletes Foundation, to whom Emmanuel applied for his mountain bike, are so taken with him that in 2002 they fly him to America to participate in the 53-mile bicycle portion of the San Diego Triathlon Challenge. There he meets Jim McLaren, who has come back from two devastating accidents to be an athletic competitor, and Rudy Garcia-Tolsen, an astonishing 14-year-old who lost his legs at age 5 and now races on what look like cybernetic stilts.
With Tolsen-Garcia shoring up his confidence, Yeboah undergoes surgery in California and is fitted for a prosthetic leg; his arrival at Ghana airport, in trousers and standing tall, is greeted by family and friends as the miracle it is. At last Emmanuel's real work can begin: overturning his country's ingrained cultural and governmental discrimination against the disabled.
Slickly overdirected, ''Emmanuel's Gift" isn't great filmmaking. Oprah Winfrey's narration has the rushed feel of someone late for her next appointment and the directors don't show us Yeboah's life so much as constantly tell us how wonderful he is. It feels almost accidental when, toward the end of the film, we realize this man has become not only a cultural hero but a civic leader, meeting with Kofi Annan, setting up a foundation to fund schooling for disabled kids, pushing through wheelchair access in his home village, and gently browbeating bureaucrats into admitting that (in the words of one) ''we may have underestimated the urgency of the matter."
Emmanuel even forgives his father for abandoning the family. Come to think of it, maybe the man is a saint. He's certainly more three-dimensional than the film through which we meet him.
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