The Tic Code

by Cindy Fuchs

"Which would you rather be, normal and can’t play the piano, or weird and can?" This is the kind of impossible-choice question that 12-year-old Miles (Christopher George Marquette) likes to ask his mother. In response, Laura (Polly Draper) sighs. There’s only one conceivable answer, but it’s not easy or obvious. She says, honestly, that she’d rather be weird and be able to play the piano, like her son, who is, after all, a jazz prodigy. She loves Miles, of course, and appreciates his sensitivity and sense of humor in ways that someone on the outside — say, the kids at school — do not. Most importantly, she loves him with, not despite, the other thing that makes Miles feel "weird," his Tourette’s Syndrome.

When you hear that Miles has Tourette’s, an inherited neurological disorder characterized by repeated, involuntary body movements (tics) and vocal sounds, you might imagine that the movie is about his courageous struggle or maybe his triumphant musicianship. But the movie is mostly less grand than that. Granted, it does lapse into disease-of-the-week-ish triteness and lurch to a trumped-up climax; written by Draper (thirtysomething), it’s based in part on her experiences with her husband, jazz saxophonist Michael Wolff, who has Tourette’s. But The Tic Code also manages, during its gentler moments, to work out a complex relationship between mother and son.

The two are understandably close since the years-back departure of Miles’ father (James McCaffery), also a jazz musician. His brief appearance in the film — he meets Miles at the airport during a layover on his way to a gig in Budapest — is enough to mark him as the complete villain, not only unsupportive, but tactless and selfish to boot. This appearance also underlines the fact that Laura is the film’s incontrovertible hero, generously and stubbornly devoted to helping Miles feel just a little less weird. She gets him into the Village Vanguard, where he’s able to jam with some of the musicians, and she tracks down saxophonist Tyrone Pike (Gregory Hines), who also happens to have Tourette’s.

Tyrone adds welcome dimensions to the mother-son relationship, which shifts to accommodate not only his mentoring of Miles, but also his evolving romance with Laura. Both of these relationships are complicated, however, by the fact that Tyrone doesn’t want to talk about his own disorder. Though he describes it to a school bully (Robert Iler) who’s been harassing Miles as a special "tic code," he’s plainly mortified by his own weird behaviors and would rather not mention them.

And wouldn’t you know, he and Miles can learn from one another.

On paper and in execution, it is too often a straight-up TV movie. What makes it at all engaging are the performances (in particular Marquette’s), appealing secondary characters (especially Miles’ best friend Todd, played by Desmond Robertson) and occasional complications of the melodramatic formula.

Refreshingly, and maybe unsurprisingly, given that he’s based on a real person, Tyrone is the primary vehicle for the film’s more provocative insights. So, he’s a cool cat jazz artist, but also sometimes insecure and angry, willfully blind to his and Miles’ "differences" from the other guys, who don’t understand because they don’t have to. He’s a thoughtful father figure, but reticent on the issue that clearly looms between them; he’s a gentle and generous lover, but also inclined to anxiety and diffidence. In another movie, these characteristics might be attributed to Tyrone’s dealings with racism. But here "the racial thing," as Tyrone calls it, just doesn’t come up much. Tyrone uses it an excuse when Miles asks him why he’s stopped seeing Laura ("We’re too different, it’s a cultural thing"), but otherwise, no one seems too concerned.

This strategy is both nervy and encouraging, as the phrase "cultural" differences takes on a range of meanings, including Laura’s surprise that her jazz musician boyfriend would know about Horowitz’s piano-playing style ("What, baby?" he retorts. "I went to Juilliard, I know my shit"). Or more pointedly, during a small, complex moment, almost lost amid the rest of the film’s emotional hubbub. Excited to be called "a white cat who plays like a brother," Miles starts mimicking his mentors’ speech patterns. When Laura tells him not to imitate people like that, Miles points out she never objects when he does his version of "Indian" Pidgin English. Though she protests that he doesn’t swear when he does "Gandhi-man," the moment is uncomfortable enough to make its point: Prejudice is a function of ignorance, willful or not.