"You can always have a happy ending," Orson Welles used to say. "It just depends on where you stop the movie." That sober observation is the problem mentally challenged Sam Dawson (Sean Penn) faces in his struggle to retain custody of his daughter, and that is the problem some critics have with Director Jessie Nelson's I AM SAM. Macresarf1 is happy to report that she and her co-writer, Kristine Nelson, have crafted a perfect legal remedy for his problem, which is also a reasonable dramatic solution for Ms. Nelson's picture. It does not satisfy her critics, nor would it appease lay-critics of real-life Sam's. (But you do understand that there are no guarantees in life, don't you? Not for any of us.)

I AM SAM begins badly for its hostile critics by scandalously highlighting Starbucks -- I don't like the outfit, nor the touting of products either -- and in its first half hour, the picture exhibits an astonishing series of passing images and location shots of Equal, Sweet 'n Low, Huggies, The IHOP, Pizza Hut, etc, etc. Then, it enrages critics further by testifying that "mentally retarded" Sam could impregnate a homeless woman and produce a normal child. How absurd can you get? How "up-chucking," as one critic put it. Finally, Sam is able, somehow, to love, bond with and rear his daughter until she is seven years-old. DIS-gusting!!

Terms like dreck, trash, revolting, sugarfit, shameful sentimentality and total fantasy are used to describe I AM SAM. I thought that we were dealing with a couple of minor inattentive bigots or flinthearts when I started to read the reviews, but we have a distinguished Epinions critic making such judgments, and half the mainline critics -- Roeper of Ebert and Roeper, Charles Taylor, etc, no less.

Does it looks dark for I AM SAM?

Don't you believe it! I AM SAM, despite a few sentimental, manipulative, and credibility lapses, is in its totality a film worth supporting with your time and attention.

The film begins with Sam at work in an LA Starbucks. Like most educable, challenged individuals, routine is his preservation. He carefully arranges the artificial sugars in their little receptacles, lines up the coffee mugs on the shelves, shuffles among the customers, repeating, "You made a very good choice." Sam is accepted by customers and management alike.

[One thing I learned from excellent special education colleagues is that well-nurtured, educable mentally retarded students (so known in my time as a teacher) generally make better workers, friends, partners, parents -- better drivers! -- than their more highly endowed classmates. Anything that they can fit into a routine, with proper encouragement, they tend to be eager for. They know their limits and try desperately to remain within them. Upon graduation at my school, these students, year after year, were placed in and remained in jobs at a significantly higher percentage than did other graduating seniors. They knew what is positive in society, and many concentrated heart and mind upon being successful!]

Sam, when completing his shift at the coffee shop, has a new experience before him. Sam must go to the hospital in time for the birth of his baby. After watching the birth with considerable horror, he is asked by the nurse to name his daughter. Sam, as we shall learn perhaps too well, is a Beatles freak, and so, after the famous song title, he names his daughter, Lucy Diamond Dawson. Unfortunately, Mom has no desire to stay with Sam or her baby -- she was a homeless woman he took in, who stayed to term in her pregnancy for the food and lodging -- thus, Sam is soon abandoned at a bus stop with Lucy.

The befuddled Sam knows concepts like diapers, milk, bottles, and so he presently enters a supermarket, trying to make purchases and hold his baby at the same time. Having assumed Lucy would have her mother, not able to conceive that a mother would reject her child, he is in real trouble. Fortuitously, in the apartment across the court, is Annie (Diane Wiest), a talented and kindly agoraphobic. (The housing complex appears to be a kind city facility for people on subsistence.) She carefully and simply schools Sam in what to do for Lucy, and soon (in a bit of foreshadowing) they are bringing her up jointly.

In a montage of sequences (set to the Beatles' "Two of Us"), we see Sam and Lucy bond, witness the positive influence of Annie; and we meet Sam's group of harmless paranoid, obsessive-compulsive, or autistic friends. They operate on a strict social schedule and will support him through the rest of the action.

Critics claim that these scenes are crazy, sugary and condescending. I would urge you to judge that for yourselves, but I believe I discern cinematic method in Director Nelson's madness. I AM SAM is a little film which drew a number of major stars to it, some of whom must have worked for scale. (I shall pass over Mary Steengurgen's cameo.) The film was produced on a limited budget. Scores of "angels" and organizations are thanked in the end credits. And so, Nelson puts most of her commercial tie-ins and slightly grotesque scenes up front, insuring that as the film progresses, we grow to like Sam and his milieux; we empathize with his plight; and gradually we realize what he is up against.

Some years later, as Sam plays with Lucy (now Dakota Fanning) or reads to her his favorite (and almost only) book, Green Eggs and Ham, we understand his single-minded love for her, and how she returns it. But as she grows older and goes to pre-school, "the inevitable questions arise." Lucy will soon outstrip Sam in intellectual development. She will have to take care of him.

At that point, the local school alerts Child Services in the form of Margaret Calgrove (Loretta Devine), who has legitimate doubts about Lucy's emotional health and development under the arrangement Sam and Annie have formed. In time, the State enters the conflict, when Assistant D.A. Turner (Richard Schiff) brings Child Court action to determine the suitability of Sam as a father.

[Critics here accuse Nelson and Johnson of "demonizing" the State and Child Services. We can read some scenes that way, or attribute most of it to Sam's point of view. Assistant D.A. Turner speaks reasonably from experience, I think, saying that should Sam's counsel succeed in winning sole custody of Lucy for Sam, the D.A.'s Office may have to deal with the sad results later on, as he personally has had to often before. And Counselor Calgrove states the plain truth, that protecting the welfare of children is "our job." I think "demonizing" is too strong a term for how these characters are depicted. One critic objects to the fact that Ms. Calgrove seems the one important person of color in I AM SAM. That may be a legitimate criticism.]

Urged on by recommendations of his friends, Sam books an appointment with Rita Harrison (Michelle Pfeiffer), a top flight Century City domestic affairs attorney. Vain, faultlessly turned out, Rita fields a clientele of affluent, driven, unhappy couples and their presumably emotionally disturbed children. Rita is a mirror image of her clients. In a highly nervous state, focused primarily on advancing her practice, she can never be in her luxurious split-level, hillside home enough for her own son, and her husband is always elsewhere, on business. (We never do meet him.)

How Sam persuades her to take his case, how he ingenuously ingratiates himself into her life, how he becomes part of it, is not just an embarrassing subplot, as the critics conclude, but the heart of the film's meaning. Sam is a fully human being, able to comprehend, receive and give love.

Would I AM SAM work without Sean Penn and Michelle Pfeiffer? I doubt it. If you will observe carefully, you may realize that each plays magnificently off each other. At first sight, we think Sam's gestures, strange gait, enthusiasms, angers, embarrassments, despondency's, small triumphs and failures are the "funny" actions of a grotesque. But we indulge, and grudgingly sympathize with, the spoiled, bleak antics of the gorgeous Rita ("Met-a Maid," as Sam and Lucy tag her). However, half way through the movie the actors achieve parity. Each is portraying a hurt, flawed character, valuable in his or her own way.

Until that point, we simply admire, and identify with the beautiful, well-educated, affluent Rita. We are drawn to her because most of us wish to emulate her success, but we avert our eyes from the Sam's of the World.

[I was amused, and a bit p*ssed off, frankly, that Charles Taylor of Salon, in his scornful review, went on and on how incredible (and wasted) Michelle Pfeiffer was in her role, while Sean Penn was just a mass of cheap tics and stereotypes.]

Penn and Pfeiffer are memorable, and the editing of Richard Chew (SHANGHAI NOON, 2000), breaking zoom shots and close-ups into planes, selecting different camera angles, helps them immensely to convey their emotional states.

The music of John Powell (SHREK, 2000) is generally subdued, but he does use perhaps a few too many Beatles pieces (done mostly by other artists).

I shall not reveal the perfect legal solution to Lucy's future, which the Lovely Rita suggests, and the lovable Sam imprints upon Randy Carpenter (Laura Dern), a commendably conscientious court-appointed foster mom. I did think, perhaps, Nelson lost her mastery here, punching up the subtlety of her solution a bit, fearing I assume that we would miss it.

I AM SAM is an entertaining, moving lesson in human relations. Little Dakota Fanning makes a precocious but endearing locus for the conflict. The film has its problems, I agree, but the performances of Penn and Pfeiffer make it for me -- and I hope for you -- a four star movie.

BTW, depressing as it is to say, a number of adverse critics obviously did miss the solution to this film's conflict.

As Orson Welles said: "It just depends on where you stop the movie."

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Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12