Regarding Henry is a 1991 American drama film directed by Mike Nichols and written by J.J. Abrams. It stars Harrison Ford as a New York City lawyer from a dysfunctional family, who struggles to regain his memory and recover his speech and mobility after he survives a shooting, inadvertently restoring his family's integrity in the process.
The supporting cast includes Annette Bening, Mikki Allen, Bill Nunn, Rebecca Miller, Bruce Altman and Elizabeth Wilson. The film received mixed reviews with praise for the cast and Ford's performance but criticized for its perceived sentimentality. The film grossed $88 million at the box office on a production budget of $25 million.
Plot
Ambitious, callous, narcissistic, and at times unethical, Henry Turner is a wealthy successful Manhattan lawyer whose obsession with his work leaves him little time for his socialite wife, Sarah, and troubled preteen daughter, Rachel. He has just won a malpractice suit, defending a hospital against a plaintiff who claims, but is unable to prove, that he warned doctors about a pre-existing condition.
Henry survives but can neither move nor talk and he suffers retrograde amnesia. While in a nursing facility, he slowly regains movement and speech with the help of a physical therapist named Bradley. Henry's recovery creates a financial burden for the family. Upon returning home, Henry is almost childlike. As he forges new relationships with his family, he realizes he does not like who he once was.
Sarah enrolls Rachel in an out-of-town elite school, though she is now reluctant to go, because she and Henry now have a good relationship. At orientation, Henry tells Rachel a lie to help her adjust to the new school. He and Sarah grow closer, as they were when they first met. Henry also misses Rachel.
Henry's firm allows him to return out of deference to his previous contributions. Sarah suggests they relocate to a smaller, less expensive residence. As his firm essentially assigns him only low-level work, he realizes he no longer wants to be a lawyer. While at a dinner party, they overhear several "friends" making derogatory comments about him.
While going through his closet, Henry finds a former colleague's letters to Sarah, disclosing they had an affair. He confronts Sarah, and she admits to the brief affair, but reminds Henry that they’d been unhappy in their marriage for a long time. He becomes angry and leaves home, finding himself drawn to the Ritz hotel.
While he thinks things over in a room, he hears a knock at the door. It’s Linda, a fellow attorney, who has followed him there. She reveals that they’d been having an affair, and they’d met twice a week in that room. She also says he was going to leave Sarah for her. Henry doesn’t want to hear it and leaves.
Henry gives the documents that his firm suppressed to the plaintiff that proves their case, and he apologizes. He then resigns from the firm. He realizes that, as Sarah had said, everything had been wrong before but it is now so much better. They reconcile, then go to Rachel's school to withdraw her. She is overjoyed to go home with her parents.
Mike Stevens, Nico Golfar: assistant recording engineers
Reception
Critical reception
Initial critical reception was mainly lukewarm to negative. Vincent Canby of The New York Times described the film as "a sentimental urban fairy tale" that "succeeds neither as an all-out inspirational drama nor as a send-up of American manners."[3]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times rated the film two out of four stars and commented, "There is possibly a good movie to be found somewhere within this story, but Mike Nichols has not found it in Regarding Henry. This is a film of obvious and shallow contrivance, which aims without apology for easy emotional payoffs, and tries to manipulate the audience with plot twists that belong in a sitcom." Ebert also described the way it makes a connection between Ritz Crackers and the Ritz-Carlton hotel (which reveals that Henry's affair had in fact been deeply embedded in his apparently lost memories) as "especially annoying", apparently regarding it as comic.[4]
Rita Kempley of The Washington Post called the film "a tidy parable of '90s sanctimony"[5] while Peter Travers of Rolling Stone described it as a "slick tearjerker" that "has a knack for trivializing the big issues it strenuously raises." However, he praised Ford's performance.[6]
Variety, however, called the film "a subtle emotional journey impeccably orchestrated by director Mike Nichols and acutely well acted."[7]
The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a "Rotten" 49% rating based on 35 reviews, with an average rating of 5.2/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "Although Harrison Ford makes the most of an opportunity to dig into a serious role, Regarding Henry is undermined by cheap sentiment and clichés."[8] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 47 out of 100 based on 23 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[9] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.[10]
Box office
The film opened in 800 theaters in the United States on July 12, 1991, and grossed $6,146,782 on its opening weekend, ranking seventh at the US box office. It eventually grossed $43,001,500 in the United States and Canada.[11] It grossed $44.9 million internationally for a worldwide total of $87.9 million.[12]
The film was released on Region 1 DVD on September 9, 2003.[15] It is in anamorphic widescreen format with audio tracks in English and French and subtitles in English. Australian premium label Imprint Films released the film on Blu-ray in April 2021.[16]
