I Am Sam

I Am Sam
Directed by	Jessie Nelson
Written by	Kristine Johnson, Jessie Nelson
Produced by	Jessie Nelson Barbara Hall Marshall Herskovitz Ed Zwick Richard Solomon
Starring	Sean Penn Michelle Pfeiffer Dakota Fanning Laura Dern Richard Schiff Loretta Devine Dianne Wiest Brent Spiner
Distributed by	New Line Cinema
Release dates	December 28, 2001
Running time	132 min.
Language	English
Budget	$22,000,000 (estimate)

I Am Sam is a 2001 drama film that tells a story about a autistic father and his efforts to retain custody of his daughter.

The film was directed by Jessie Nelson and stars Sean Penn with Michelle Pfeiffer, Dakota Fanning, Dianne Wiest, Loretta Devine, Richard Schiff, Laura Dern and Brent Spiner and was written by Kristine Johnson and Jessie Nelson, who also directed the film. The film also features three people, with disabilities, who are playing themselves: Brad Silverman, Joe Rosenberg, and Brian Bialick, all of them are in a group called L.A. GOAL (Greater Opportunities for the Advanced Living), a social organization that deals with adults with developmental disabilities.

Sean Penn was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor.

Synopsis

Sam Dawson (Sean Penn), a mentally challenged adult, is single-handedly raising his daughter Lucy (Dakota Fanning), whom he fathered from a homeless woman who wanted nothing to do with Lucy and left him the day of her birth. Although Sam provides a loving and caring environment for the 7-year-old Lucy, she soon surpasses her father's mental capacity. Questions arise about Sam’s ability to care for Lucy and a custody case is brought to court.

Sam is a man with a mental age of 7 who is well adjusted and has a great support system consisting of four similarly developmentally disabled men. His neighbor Annie (Dianne Wiest), a piano-player and agoraphobe, befriends Sam and takes care of Lucy when Sam cannot.

He works at Starbucks bussing tables. Sam is popular with the customers, whom he addresses by name and favorite coffee. His job only gets difficult when Lucy starts grabbing objects and making a woman spill iced coffee down her shirt. In a humorous, but innocent exchange, Sam tries to remove an ice cube from the startled woman's cleavage. Sam then brings Lucy to his neighbor and baby Lucy croons, "Annie!" Sam says, "Her first word was Annie." Flustered but flattered, she retorts, "And people worry you aren't smart," and agrees to function as Lucy's babysitter.

Lucy is as precocious as Sam is backwards. Sam loves reading Green Eggs and Ham to her, but when she starts reading "real hard" books like Stellaluna, she balks at reading the word "different" because she doesn't want to be smarter than her dad. She knows he's different, "not like other dads", but that's all right with her because he is loving, taking her to the park and to International House of Pancakes (every Wednesday, because "Wednesday is IHOP night").

When they decide to go to Big Boy for a change, Sam causes a disturbance because he cannot get the kind of French pancakes he is accustomed to. At the school Halloween party, he dresses as one of the Beatles but embarrasses his daughter by drawing undue attention. Other kids tease her, calling her dad a "retard". She tells one boy that she is adopted. This causes a crisis at her birthday party, which results in an unexpected visit from a social worker who takes Lucy away. A judge allows him only two supervised, 2-hour visits per week.

Sam's friends recommend that he hire Rita (Michelle Pfeiffer), a lawyer. He shows up at her office and starts spilling out his situation while she juggles coffee orders to her assistant, Patricia. Socially, Sam is rather high-functioning--more together in many ways than his high-class, respected lawyer whose marriage is falling apart and whose son hates her.

Sam surprises Rita at a party. Stunned, she announces that she's taking his case pro bono, because others see her as cold and heartless.

Rita begrudgingly works with Sam to help him keep his parental rights, but chaos arises when Lucy convinces Sam to help her run away from the foster home she is being kept in during the trial. Over the course of the trial, Sam gets a new job at Pizza Hut and Annie leaves her apartment for the first time in years. Sam also helps Rita with her family problems, and helps her to realize how much her son really means to her.

During the trial, however, Sam breaks down, after being convinced that he is not capable of taking care of Lucy.

Meanwhile, Lucy is placed with a foster family who plan to adopt her. Lucy often runs away from her foster parents in the middle of the night to go see Sam, who moved into a larger apartment closer to her.

In the end, the foster family who planned on adopting Lucy lets Sam have custody of her. Sam says that Lucy still needs a mother and asks if the foster mother would like to help raise Lucy. The movie ends with Lucy's soccer game where Sam is the referee. In attendance are Lucy's former foster family, the newly divorced Rita and her son with whom Rita has renewed her relationship, along with Annie and Sam's other friends.

Cast

• Sean Penn as Sam Dawson
• Michelle Pfeiffer as Rita Harrison Williams
• Dakota Fanning as Lucy Diamond Dawson
• Dianne Wiest as Annie Cassell
• Loretta Devine as Margaret Calgrove
• Richard Schiff as Mr. Turner
• Laura Dern as Randy Carpenter

Soundtrack

Main article: I Am Sam (soundtrack)

The soundtrack consists entirely of covers of songs by The Beatles. Initially, Penn wanted to set the movie solely to Beatles recordings. When the producers attempted to obtain the rights to use the songs, they learned that Michael Jackson, who owned the rights, was charging $300,000 per song. Should the rights have been purchased, it would have cost $4.5 million dollars, which would have set a record in terms of money paid for songs in a Hollywood production. Instead, Penn commissioned other artists, such as Eddie Vedder, Sheryl Crow, Sarah McLachlan, Rufus Wainwright, The Wallflowers, The Vines, and Ben Folds, to cover the songs for the soundtrack.

Song uses

Sam's daughter is named after the song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". Lucy's idyllic early years are accompanied by "Across the Universe". At the Halloween party "I'm Looking Through You" drives home the point that Sam is "not the same" as other adults. We see Sam and Rita's relationship grow to "Golden Slumbers". Sam's lawyer's name comes from the Beatles song "Lovely Rita", a point made by Lucy. At the end of the film "Two of Us" is used to show the bond between Sam and Lucy.

Response

The film was met with mixed reviews as some pointed out the fact that it has a hint of unrealism due to the fact that Sean Penn managed to speak more clearly and appear less disabled towards the end. More predominantly, the reviews were of unsurpassed praising to the film for the way in which it accurately portrayed the parts of life that "most just don't want to think about".

See also

• Green Eggs and Ham

External links

• I Am Sam at IMDb
• I Am Sam at Rotten Tomatoes.
• Official Website