The World According to Garp is a 1982 American comedy drama film produced and directed by George Roy Hill and starring Robin Williams in the title role.

Garp spends time visiting his mother and the people who live at her center, including transgender ex-football player, Roberta Muldoon.

He also first hears the story of Ellen James, a girl who was raped at age 11 by two men who then cut out her tongue so that she could not identify her attackers.

A group of women represented at Jenny's center, "Ellen Jamesians", voluntarily cut out their own tongues as a show of solidarity.

Commenting that he is finally flying, Garp flashes back to a time when his mother would toss him into the air (seen in the opening credits sequence).

In a 2023 interview, John Irving stated that George Roy Hill approached him to write the screenplay, but that a bone of contention was the character of Roberta Muldoon, who Irving imagined more empathetically: It was the early 1980s when George Roy Hill asked me if I would write the screenplay for Garp, but I knew we didn’t see eye to eye about Roberta.

George was a World War II guy; he couldn’t see past the comedic part of a transgender woman who’d been an NFL player.

[2] On Metacritic, the film holds a weighted average score of 63 out of 100, based on 14 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

He was "entertained but unmoved", considering it a "palatable" interpretation of the novel, "wonderfully well-written", yet "cruel, annoying and smug", and wrote: I thought the acting was unconventional and absorbing (especially by Williams, by Glenn Close as his mother, and by John Lithgow as a transsexual).

[4]Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that "the movie is a very fair rendering of Mr. Irving's novel, with similar strengths and weaknesses.

If the novel was picaresque and precious, so is the film – although the absence of the book's self-congratulatory streak helps the movie achieve a much lighter, more easy-going style.

"[5] Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote, "There's no feeling of truth in either the book or the movie," and that this "generally faithful adaptation, seems no more (and no less) than a castration fantasy".