A Review of The Film Homeless to Harvard

From the young age of 3, Liz Murray often saw her parents taking or injecting drugs. Neither her mother nor her father would take care of her or her sister Lisa, and due to this, she and her sister often went hungry. Liz was often the “smelly” kid in school. She wore filthy and greasy clothes, had lice and bunked school often, though showing up in the last week before exams and attaining good results. That means, although Liz was brought up in a dysfunctional family, she could become a rotten child, but somehow, she managed to keep up her spirit.

However, one day, due to her mother’s worsened conditions, the cops took her mother away to a rehab home and Liz was placed into a shelter home. Her experience in the shelter home was dreadful. All of these struggles of life were too much to handle alone for a young kid like her and subsequently, she dropped out of school and ran away. Later she stayed into her grandfather’s home along with her sister and mother. Soon after, her mother died of AIDS. Liz mentioned that her mother’s death was “a real slap in the face” and that “I needed to get on with my life”. So, Liz left her home and became homeless at the age of 15. She lived on streets with her best friend Chris. She slept on subway station benches, shoplifted for food or books and even begged on the streets. The movie reached its climax when her indomitable spirit again guided her to be proactive and take responsibility of her life: “I knew at that moment I had to make a choice… I could submit to everything and live a life of excuses, or I could push myself… and make my life good…” She practically begged a professor to get into a college. She also did part-time jobs to make a living. Her remarkable perseverance to work as hard as she could to give life a chance was observed explicitly through various feats – washing dishes (the part-time job) while studying with notes stuck on the wall, last-one-out-first-one-in in school, doing her homework in the subway trains and graduating with the highest scores. At last, she graduated from her college in only two years, where four is normal.

Liz went on a field trip to the famous Harvard University with her professor and she made her mind up: she desperately needed to get into a good university like Harvard. However, when she was looking at the admission fee, Liz became disappointed. She couldn’t handle all that money. Luckily, the New York Times was funding for universities if someone could win an essay competition. With the help of her impregnable determination and integrity, Liz wrote an essay and won the scholarship. She got into Harvard University and graduated in 2009.

This movie is fairly short, about 90 minutes. It is amazing how the director was able to bring up Liz Murray’s real life on-screen in only 91 minutes. The dialogues were excellent and inspiring as well. However, there were a few times when the movie seemed unclear about Liz’s timeline of her life. Nevertheless, ignoring the minor drawback, “Homeless to Harvard” is a spectacular movie worth of spending one’s time on it. Most of us get miserable and despondent from time to time by various challenges of life. “Homeless to Harvard” is a movie of real-life grit and bravery, which inspires us to realize and believe in our dormant potential within and not waste our precious lives, while facing tough times.     

Works Cited

1. Murray, L. (2010). Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard. Hachette Books.
2. Murray, L. (2013). Liz Murray: From Homeless to Harvard. TED Talk. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/liz_murray_from_homeless_to_harvard/transcript?language=en#t-282750
3. Powers, E. (2003). Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard. New York Times.
4. Schlosser, R. (2016). The Perseverance of Liz Murray: From Homeless to Harvard. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardschlosser/2016/08/03/the-perseverance-of-liz-murray-from-homeless-to-harvard/?sh=2d88905d4636
5. Schorr, A. (2013). From Homeless to Harvard: 6 Ways Liz Murray Transformed Her Life. Fast Company.
6. Steinberg, D. (2012). Liz Murray's Amazing Life Journey From Homeless To Harvard. NPR.
7. Toonkel, J. (2017). How Liz Murray Went From Homeless To Harvard. Business Insider. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/liz-murray-from-homeless-to-harvard-2017-8
8. Vanderbilt, M. (2019). From Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story. Reader's Digest.
9. Wadman, M. C. (2014). Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story. Nursing Made Incredibly Easy!, 12(4), 38-41.
10. Wyman, C. (2003). Book Review: Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 160(2), 390-391.