The Wild Child

True, he faithfully renders the journals of Itard. He also stops at the story's most exultant moment, before the constraints of linguistic and biological reality make Victor more than a subject for study, as increasingly, as his mind exhausts its limits, the poor boy becomes first a nuisance, then a disappointment, and finally a castaway. From this clever opportunism and his decision to cast himself as the educator, we know how sympathetically Truffaut feels for Itard, admiring his experiment and accepting its premises. However, the dirty truth of its history adds an awkward and complicated dimension to the film's subject. Can one produce a great work that is also propaganda? I guess you can, because however distasteful and convenient and plain wrong I find the film's conclusion, I also melt under its great, grandiloquent vision of the bond between person and person, and of the tool that, once mastered, transcends and eliminates all cultural and physical barriers, natural or unnatural.

Besides, Itard gets his in the end anyway: