Color Book is the perfect film arriving at the perfect time for Father’s Day. After building a strong reputation on the festival circuit and picking up awards along the way, Color Book finally landed on Netflix on June 19, giving a wider audience the chance to discover this deceptively simple story about a father trying to take his son to a baseball game. Of course, there has to be a little more to it than that.
The film is shot in black and white, a stylistic choice that gives Atlanta an almost timeless quality. But the most notable decision is casting Jeremiah Daniels, an actor with Down syndrome, as the son. Daniels is a little older than the character he’s playing, which actually works in the film’s favor by allowing him to bring more emotional depth to the role. Besides, that’s something movies do all the time. You rarely see someone younger playing older. It’s almost always the other way around.
The biggest standout here is William Catlett as Lucky, the father. It’s an extraordinary performance. Even without an audio description track, I could feel that this was a father who would do absolutely anything for his son. Lucky is struggling to hold things together after the loss of his wife, while both he and his son try to figure out what this new family dynamic looks like. Communication isn’t always easy between them, and the title Color Book refers to the son’s coloring book, which becomes an important visual motif throughout the film.
You’re probably wondering how a blind film critic knows that. The answer is research. Since the film doesn’t include audio description, I had to look into some of the visual elements afterward to understand what I was missing. There are several stretches of the movie where scenes play out visually with little or no dialogue, and I honestly wasn’t always sure what was happening. But in the moments where I did know exactly what was happening, this movie hit like a ton of bricks.
There’s an extended sequence involving public transportation on the way to the baseball game that is incredibly tense. It’s frustrating, nerve-racking, and emotionally exhausting in exactly the way it needs to be. More importantly, it gives Catlett a chance to absolutely shine. There’s a stretch where he’s shouting in pure desperation and frustration that honestly feels like the kind of scene you pull out when you’re putting together an Oscar reel.
Of course, this is also a film centered on disability, which means I’m naturally going to pay attention to it. I’m a disabled film critic, and when I see films like this featuring disabled performers and disability representation, I want to help give them visibility when they’re doing it well. Thankfully, Color Book absolutely is doing it well.
The frustrating part is that it’s a disability-focused film with no audio description. That’s a pretty ridiculous oversight. What makes this story resonate is that it isn’t exclusively about Down syndrome. It’s about parenting a disabled child and constantly thinking several steps ahead. Any parent taking their child from home to a baseball game has to think about transportation, timing, safety, and accessibility. The specifics change depending on the disability, but the thought process remains the same. In Color Book, Lucky and his son struggle simply to secure transportation. If the child were a wheelchair user, the concerns would be completely different, but the planning and problem-solving would be just as real. Because of that, this film reaches a very specific audience, but it should also recognize that audience and be prepared to accommodate them. It’s hard not to be disappointed when a movie built around disability isn’t fully accessible to disabled viewers.
My final grade is probably a little higher than it otherwise might be because I suspect I would appreciate the film even more if I had access to audio description. That doesn’t mean I automatically go easy on movies about disability. If a film isn’t good, it’s not good. But Color Book is good. There are moments of genuine brilliance here. The problem is that I can’t connect every dot because some of those dots were left inaccessible to me. Knowing that makes the experience more frustrating than it should be.
Even so, Color Book feels tailor-made for this Father’s Day weekend. It’s a moving story about fathers and sons, grief, perseverance, and the complicated realities that come with raising a disabled child. For baseball fans, parents, and especially fathers raising disabled children, Color Book is an emotional roller coaster that’s absolutely worth taking. The lack of audio description keeps it from reaching its full potential for me, but it’s still one hell of a ride.
Fresh: 8.5/10
