I Am Sam is about a mentally disabled man, played by Sean Penn, who ends up in a legal battle to retain custody of his child, played by a preternaturally mature Dakota Fanning. Even though every facet of the film is emotionally manipulative, I enjoyed it more than I expected. It has a frenzied kinetic energy that is somehow not off putting and feels organic to the characters instead of staged so it adds to the momentum of the film. When the characters achieve the desired calm and stillness within a scene, you can empathize with the characters on a visceral level and actually breathe a sigh of relief at the opportunity to rest with them.
I adore Michelle Pfeiffer and completely related to her lawyer character, which ranks in comparable favorable terms to the lawyer mother played by Marcia Gay Harden in Grandma or Marcia Clark in O.J.: Made In America. For me, I Am Sam becomes realistic when we focus on her harried professional life as she receives social condemnation for professional success. I loved how she was incessantly eating food and could relate to her interruptions having interruptions. She never gets a moment that is not frenzied, distracted or rushed. When she asks straightforward questions, people respond in odd ways, and her reaction to their strangeness is delightfully on the nose.
Pfeiffer is not the point of I Am Sam, but a strong supporting character to a legal drama that seemed unrealistic and way too personal for a court proceeding. The main attraction is Penn, and his performance felt as if a broad brush painted it. There is a scene where he and his other mentally disabled buddies, some of whom were played by mentally disabled actors, are trying to create an outgoing message on his answering machine. His friends’ coaching felt like an implicit critique of his performance: too loud, emotional, effusive, not normal. Compared with a documentary like I Am Dina, Penn misses the mark, but fortunately it does not feel like a mean spirited interpretation of reality, just a misguided one. He acts like a child in a man’s body, not a man with a child’s level of knowledge. There is a difference, which neither Penn nor the filmmakers capture.
The lighting is a bit obvious, but functions well. There is a cool blue tint to the legal proceedings and warmer hues in the beginning and the end of the movie when father and daughter are happy together. I Am Sam benefits from having amazing supporting characters with strong actors such as Dianne Wiest and Laura Dern, but fails to fully fold them into the narrative. They act as anchors at the beginning and the end of the film respectively. Instead of a devoting so much time to the legal drama and zero sum games of custody, exploring the village approach to child rearing would have made it a stronger film. This problem is endemic to Hollywood dramas so it was not unexpected.
Perhaps because I expected so little from I Am Sam, I enjoyed it more than it deserved. It was a heart warming, well-crafted drama despite the contrived plot twists forcing us to arrive at the conclusion that love and good intentions are the only things that are needed to raise a child. Come for the father and daughter love fest, stay for the excellent performances by the supporting actors, including Pfeiffer, Fanning, Wiest and Dern.