Oof. Dumbstruck is so awkward and sad. The filmmaking is also pretty terrible, which doesn't help the enterprise. Most cringeworthy, perhaps, is the thirteen-year-old white Ohio kid who has a black ventriloquist dummy called Reggie. It's painfully awkward, and even weirder, it goes strangely unremarked in this movie. No one seems to think this might be blackface.
Even worse, perhaps, Comedian Willie Brown, the Black puppeteer on the poster – and on the cover of the DVD – does not even appear in the film; it looks like he was intended to be one of the film's subjects but was edited out of it.
The most interesting figure, perhaps, is the intersex puppeteer Wilma Swartz, who has been completely abandoned by her family for living her life as a woman but has been embraced by her ventriloquist family.
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