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| I Am Sam |
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  (7/10)
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Runtime: 132 |
| Public Rating: 9.15 (20 votes) |
Director: Jessie Nelson |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Drama |
Year: 2001 |
| Writer(s): Kristine Johnson |
| Distributor: 1 |
| Reviewed by: Oktay Ege Kozak |
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Starring: Sean Penn, Michelle Pfeiffer, Dakota Fanning, Dianne Wiest, Loretta Devine, Laura Dern.
At least once every year, I sit through a movie that conducts a thorough battle between my senses and my emotions. I Am Sam could be seen in that category so accurately, that from now on, it deserves comparison in that field to any other movie that comes forth in my life. Most of it doesn’t make any sense as much as real life is involved, it blends the line between being too mushy and being too credible and the manipulative manners of the script attack your senses so directly that you feel like you’re stuck in a universe of phone company commercials. It is also emotionally captivating, artistically challenging and thoughtfully executed and even though my senses told me that it’s an overly-sensitive pile of crap with gold toppings, my emotions engaged me into acknowledging it as a well-drawn-out piece of drama with compelling characters, nice pseudonyms and incredible acting. In the end, my emotions won the fight simply because after watching it, the number of scenes that moved me out outnumbered the number of scenes that disillusioned me.
The movie tells the story of Sam who is a disabled man with a mental age of seven and his little daughter who is a couple of months away from being the smartest person in the house. These two people have great chemistry together and until the real conflict comes along, the movie starts to challenge us with the growing difference between the intelligence of the father and daughter by having the daughter not wanting to read books that outgrow her father’s intellectual capability. It is a great way of emphatically conveying the known “quest of the offspring” where the child feels the need to resemble the parent.
The real conflict mentioned above arrives when Lucy (the daughter, named after The Beatles’ song) is taken away from Sam by the government because it is thought that a mentally incapacitated man cannot govern a full-grown child. After finally coping with the idea of losing Lucy, Sam gets a stressed and somewhat confused lawyer. This creates some of the movie’s finest moments in which the lines between being capable and incapable are thoughtfully questioned. A non-intelligent man who can’t even multiply two times two is more in control with his life than a financially secure woman with a prestigious law degree. After a couple more engaging scenes involving Sam’s struggle to be able to lead a normal life for Lucy (including a heart breaking scene in a restaurant when Sam tries hard to get his mind together enough to pay the check, but fails anyway), it starts to drag with the involvement of the foster parents. Nevertheless the film manages to keep its charm until the end.
This movie is by far director-writer Jessie Nelson’s most technically challenging film. Not only does she succeed in extracting great performances from her actors, she also uses the visuals very smartly in order to enhance the dramatic value of I Am Sam. The movie is shot mostly with a handheld camera and uses a very strict palette of single colors in each scene (like Traffic did) and plays with camera movement speed and length of shots according to Sam’s emotional status. Usually, I do not like abrupt technical gimmickry in deeply dramatical movies because I believe they tend to overload us on top of the field of emotional acting and serious drama (Ali could be a good example of that). In this case, it works because we feel that the camera flows with the characters without imposing on them.
Sean Penn gives an “in-cre-dible” performance as the mentally disabled Sam and we are just taken along the ride with our jaws open as he conducts us into believing that he “is” Sam without flinching even for one millisecond. This is one of the best representations I’ve seen of a mentally incapacitated person and it is definitely up there with Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Rain Man and Tom Hanks’ performance in Forrest Gump, if not better. Penn’s counterpart Michelle Pfeifer also has a great grip on her character , a seemingly a strong successful business woman who has uncontrollable family problems and is on the verge of falling apart. The rest of the acting troupe including Sam’s buddies and his daughter, played by the cute Dakota Fanning, do a good job of helping to turn this movie into an all-around well-acted piece of dramatic “fluff”.
I Am Sam obviously has a lot of flaws and those flaws usually come from the script’s dispensation of realistic articulations in order to let the story flow the way it wants to. For example, if Lucy’s mother didn’t want her, how come she didn’t choose abortion? How could a man be arrested solely for talking to a hooker? And how could the only motivation of a top-priced lawyer to take on a pro bono case be simply because she wants to impress her friends? Also, the movie goes somewhat downhill after the court scenes where Lucy is given to a foster home and the easily resolved ending seems more like an escape from finding a real solution than coming up with something that is actually dense. Nevertheless, these are subjects that should be appreciated by the senses. In my view the movie doesn’t overly manipulate them like many other critics have commented upon concerning the movie.
Eventually, I think I Am Sam is a solid piece of emotional involvement that should be watched at least for the sheer pleasure of seeing Sean Penn’s beautifully strict performance. It also involves a simplistic but true-to-heart Beatles theme all-around and the movie has great Beatles covers all through it. In a time when every single movie battles with each other to capture the hippest hit from the most recent and most vacuous boy band, this attempt at bringing back some form of quality music deserves recognition.
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