Trailer for The Fundamentals of Caring stars Paul Rudd, Craig Roberts & Selena Gomez: Based on a book by Jonathan Evison

This is interesting to me, coming on the heels of Me Before You, another film about the relationship between a man confined to a wheelchair and the caregiver hired to look after him.  

The movie comes out—only on Netflix—on June 24;  Based on the novel The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison, the movie looks irreverant and moving. 

The Fundamentals Of Caring is a Netflix original starring Paul Rudd, Craig Roberts and Selena Gomez with Jennifer Ehle as the boy's mother.

Here's the rundown on the novel

For Ben Benjamin, all has been lost--his wife, his family, his home, his livelihood. Hoping to find a new direction, he enrolls in a night class called The Fundamentals of Caregiving, where he will learn to take care of people with disabilities. He is instructed about professionalism, about how to keep an emotional distance between client and provider, and about the art of inserting catheters while avoiding liability. But when Ben is assigned his first client--a tyrannical nineteen-year-old boy named Trevor, who is in the advanced stages of Duchenne muscular dystrophy--he soon discovers that the endless service checklists have done nothing to prepare him for the reality of caring for a fiercely stubborn, sexually frustrated teenager who has an ax to grind with the whole world.

Over time, the relationship between Ben and Trev, which had begun with mutual misgivings, evolves into a close friendship, and the traditional boundaries between patient and caregiver begin to blur. The bond between them strengthens as they embark on a road trip to visit Trev’s ailing father--a journey rerouted by a series of bizarre roadside attractions that propel them into an impulsive adventure disrupted by one birth, two arrests, a freakish dust storm, and a six-hundred-mile cat-and-mouse pursuit by a mysterious brown Buick Skylark. By the end of that journey, Trev has had his first taste of love, and Ben has found a new reason to love life.

Bursting with energy and filled with moments of absolute beauty, this big-hearted and inspired novel ponders life’s terrible surprises as well as what it takes to truly care for another human being.

What do you think? I need to read the book first but I wonder, at what point do disabled people say, hey you authors, stop using us as characters to write your inspirational books for the able-bodied out there. Especially if they don't get it right. If you're writing about a character with a specific syndrome, it's vital to depict it honestly without whitewashing the real difficulties of living with the disease. It sounds like Evison does get it right, fingers crossed the filmmakers do too.

A look at Evison's trailer for his own book is probably a pretty good indicator for the kind of approach the author takes to the subject. Brash, funny. I'd like to read this author's take on these people's lives.