Movie Review: Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story
Word to the wise: Have a box of tissues on hand. This movie is super hard to watch if you’re a mom. It’s adapted from a true story about a young woman from the Bronx whose parents are drug addicts, who survived several years living on the streets, and who did, in fact, end up going to Harvard on a scholarship from the New York Times. The movie captures the desperation, the sadness, and the resilience of Liz Murray’s heart as she preserves the love she has for both parents despite the desperate situations in which their actions left her.
As the movie opens, we get a sort of all-around portrait of a home in chaos. Mama Jean Murray is played by Kelly Lynch – shyeah, from Drugstore Cowboy and Cocktail – and she’s triple trouble: legally blind, mentally ill, and in desperate withdrawal from cocaine. As she screeches at her two daughters to give her the money they’re hiding (for food!), her husband gazes at the TV, answering all the Jeopardy questions, and very young Liz hands the hidden money to her mother, because when you’re six you do what your mom says.
Agh! It’s horrible! But look, the older sister is played by Ellen Page. Hey there, Ellen Page!
Liz’s parents go out together to score drugs, leaving the girls to worry about them and starve. The mom is carted off to a psychiatric facility every couple months, but she does her best to get herself to school – where she’s mocked for having crappy clothes and lice, and where she can’t focus because she’s tired, hungry, and too protective and embarrassed to talk to anyone about it.
Jean gets AIDS and decides to go live with her own father – Liz’s grandfather and an abusive butthead. “I can’t get clean if I’m livin’ with your dad,” she tells Liz, and I get it, but I just want to reach into the TV and shake her, too. Anyway, Grandpa smacks Liz around, so she takes off with her friend, who’s also fleeing an abusive home, and they become those kids you see sitting around on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan. Oh, and now that she’s older, she’s Thora Birch!
It’s horrible, but even so, it’s not all horrible. The part that’s sort of clear in the movie, and very clear in the book (because I paused the movie so I could go read the book and see how much of it was accurate, which I will share with you later), is that in the absence of a decent family, a lot of us create families of the heart. In the book, Liz describes a “tribe” of people on whom she could depend, from a boyfriend who helped her to bathe and care for her mother to a BFF who was a steadfast companion through long nights waiting for the sun to come up.
So there are elements of the story that are joyful, which is how people survive adversity, right? Anyway, guess what happens next: The dad goes into a shelter, and the mom dies. Here’s Liz on her mom’s casket, which WRECKED ME:
Liz survives as long as she can, and then she makes a decision to go back to school. In this movie, she just randomly decides to do this, but in the book, she’s given the idea by a slightly older Bronx kid who was also homeless. This kid let Liz and her crew crash on her couch for a time, and suggested to Liz the “alternative high school” she herself attended: Humanities Prep in Manhattan. There really are programs that help kids like this, and if Flirting with Forty is basically an ad for Hawaii, then Homeless to Harvard is a terrific endorsement of progressive schools specializing in helping kids who’ve fallen through the cracks.
This is also the part that you make your kids watch and say, “If Liz Murray can do calculus at 4 a.m. on the subway, you can finish your French homework after piano practice.” Mom mic drop.
But even at the school, Liz is an outlier: She doesn’t want to live in a shelter, so she doesn’t tell anyone she’s homeless. She just sleeps on the subway and spends long days at school, using resources there to stay safe and get four years’ of school done in two years’ time. She tries to get her friend to join her, but her friend won’t. (In real life, her friend did, and graduated.) And while applying to colleges, she stumbles on an essay contest from the New York Times, which she enters and wins (because, I mean, holy moly!), and her future comes into vivid focus.
The movie ends just as Liz is entering Harvard, and the book (and a little Google stalking) tell me that while it took a couple tries, she eventually graduated. In addition, IRL, Liz cared for her father during his final days and married her boyfriend from high school. And she has two kids of her own now, which has to be completely amazing. Anyway, hope that’s not too spoiler-y, but I recommend the book in addition to this very heart-rending movie. Do your homework, kids!
