I am not going to pretend I have much substantive to say about this movie that will make readers gasp or slap their forwards and realize, yes, that is why I should love this film! But as this is one of my wife and my favorite movies ever, I thought I would share why.
When this movie came out, we saw immediately the similarities between Raymond (Rain Man) and our daughter. No, she is not just like him. In addition to her autistic, obsessive behavior, she is deaf and developmentally delayed so that even though she knows sign language, she only answers questions with it and never uses complete sentences.
But like Raymond, she has always exhibited weird special gifts. She solves math problems on her fingers that even sign language interpreters don't understand, she remembers exact dates of things that have happened years before, she can create beautiful rugs on a large floor loom.
On the other hand, and she can't cross a street by herself, she throws a fit at times over the smallest change in her routine. For example, when she lived t home with us as a child, if we grabbed the TV guide from next to the tv to check out the schedule, she would stand over us and get more and more agitated and shake with frustration and anger. We finally had to start buying two TV guides, one that was "hers" and one that was "ours." But we couldn't buy two of everything.
So anyway, what this all meant is that when we watched Rain Man back then when we were living in our daughter's wake, we found ourselves laughing at stuff that had previously driven us crazy with frustration. Needless to say, Dustin Hoffman gave a virtuoso performance, but I think Tom Cruise's efforts were underrated, perhaps because it seems like a natural role for him.
I don't claim this is the best movie ever, just our very favorite, for personal reasons.