Sean Penn gives Dustin Hoffman a run for his money, offering up a respectable Rain Man routine in the otherwise unremarkable I Am Sam. Penn's got it all down — the flattened, staccato rhythms of the autistic voice, the awkward, uncertain gestures, the whole body language — and director Jessie Nelson does her best to construct a viable movie around his performance. She doesn't quite get there, but Penn is such a one-man show that it's often easy to overlook just how mediocre almost everything else is about I Am Sam.
As if the title weren't enough of a clue, Penn's character here is a guy named Sam. He's a lovable, mentally challenged adult who once upon a time knocked up a homeless woman and now finds himself playing single father to a 7-year old girl who's smarter than he is. The kid (Dakota Fanning) is called Lucy, so named after the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" — and, armed with that bit of trivia, one might initially wonder if Sam's condition might not somehow be linked to an overactive appetite for psychedelics in someone's distant past (maybe Sam's past or that of his parents, or maybe locked away somewhere in the closet of the movie's screenwriter).
The Beatles figure prominently in the movie, beginning with the annoyingly bland covers of Lennon-McCartney classics that punctuate the film (performed by the likes of Eddie Vedder, Aimee Mann and Sheryl Crow). Forgettable as the contemporary covers are, they're probably a necessary evil since the original, unmistakably fab versions would almost certainly have overwhelmed the slight material that constitutes I Am Sam and made the movie seem even more disposable than it already is (it's also a safe bet that rights to the originals were prohibitively expensive).
Sam, you see, is a total Beatles nut, who copes with life by Beatle-esque example and relates everything that happens to him to some bit of Beatles lore or lyrics, even when the connection is sketchy at best. Among the other, oddly endearing ways in which Sam takes comfort and makes sense of his life are weekly "movie nights" with his mentally challenged chums, eating the exact same breakfast at IHOP on a regular basis, and arranging all the artificial sugar substitutes by color at his busboy job at a local Starbucks. Sam, needless to say, is a complete creature of habit, and the movie gets considerable mileage out of cataloguing the various quirks that make up his routine.
What I Am Sam is really all about, though, is what happens when Sam's routines go to hell. A small child turns out to be the ultimate routine-buster, and the first third of I Am Sam alternates between father-daughter moments of teeth-tingling sweetness, and overblown scenes in which Sam becomes confused, agitated and even traumatized by all the new situations in which he inevitably finds himself. The department of social services finally decides that Sam is an unfit father and takes Lucy away from him (in the middle of her birthday party, no less, apparently just so the movie can exert maximum impact on the audience's emotions). Enter a gorgeous yuppie lawyer (Michele Pfeiffer) who's shamed into taking Sam's case pro bono. The gorgeous lawyer turns out to have plenty of issues of her own and — wouldn't you just know it — Sam's simple wisdom (unencumbered by the powers of higher reasoning or a taste for arugula), helps Pfeiffer's character get her own life back on track.
I Am Sam is not very good, but it's a hard movie to actively dislike, at least without being labeled a cynic or worse. Besides the beloved Beatles tunes, a cute, precocious kid and a super-sweet retarded guy, the movie is sports a handful of genuinely heartwarming moments, and a few that are pretty funny as well. In one of the better scenes, Sam and his similarly challenged pals try their hands at recording a message on a new answering machine, which they approach as if it's a mysterious artifact from some completely inscrutable alien civilization.
The movie even has a thing or two to say about some of the more curious hypocrisies of our topsy-turvy culture, but it's not exactly subtle about any of its messages. In one fairly representative scene, Sam is called "impossible" for wanting his yellow and green vegetables separated, while, in the same breath, his fancy lawyer demands an egg-white omelet, no butter, no oil, extra mushrooms. She's considered normal; he's not. To drive home the point, we're repeatedly confronted with the fact that she privately binges on jellybeans and marshmallows.
The movie's intentions seem to start from a halfway respectable place, but it soon winds up tripping all over itself in a rush to push our buttons. Weirder yet, in a bizarre effort to give her film the veneer of toughness or artistic credibility, director Nelson shoots the whole thing in a quasi-edgy style that looks lifted whole from an old John Cassavettes film. The jumpy, handheld camera is all over the place (possibly in an over-obvious attempt to mirror Sam's own perpetually disoriented state) and the mock cinema verite aesthetic couldn't be more out of place with the blatant emotional manipulation and generally syrupy tone of the movie.
To its credit, I Am Sam doesn't go too far out of its way to supply us with an overly simplified, black-and-white picture of the world. There are few convenient villains, and even the people working to take Sam's daughter away from him seem motivated by a personal sense of what they believe to be right and wrong. I Am Sam doesn't ultimately do much with these shades of gray, though, and eventually just allows itself to coast on the cute kid, the Beatles songs, Penn's broad but convincing performance and Pfeiffer's cheekbones.
And at 133 minutes, that's a lot of coasting. I Am Sam is yet another tedious example of a Hollywood movie whose inflated running time seems to exist solely as a reflection of the film's inflated notion of its own importance. There is no reason on earth that this movie should be one second longer than 90 minutes. And, frankly, even that much of I Am Sam would be a bit too much.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
Class Act
Robert Altman has tackled just about every genre there is, reinventing everything from the western (McCabe and Mrs. Miller) to the war movie (M.A.S.H.) to film noir (The Long Goodbye) and back again. Now, just a few years shy of his eighth decade of life, America's most venerated filmmaker has ventured into virgin territory once more in Gosford Park, although the results lack the fire and sheer imagination of Altman's best works.
Gosford Park is Altman's spin on one of those English dramas where a bunch of well-heeled types congregate at someone's swanky country estate for the weekend and, eventually, someone gets murdered. The film's characters include both the aristocratic weekend revelers and their assorted servants. Gosford Park pays considerable attention to the separate upstairs/downstairs worlds inhabited by these distinct classes and to modes of veiled innuendo and gossip both use to communicate.
The clever and (for Altman) relatively concise screenplay by Julian Fellowes makes it clear that the ruling class and those whom they rule have more in common than they think. Both are ultimately creatures of lust, fear, envy and any number of other primal emotions, a fact of life evidenced in all sorts of small but undeniable ways as Gosford Park progresses. Not the least of which is the appearance of a mysterious manservant (Ryan Phillippe) who acts as a sexual emissary bridging both class and sex (he's an apparent commoner desired not just by his high-born hostess but by his male employer as well).
The characters are intriguing, the ensemble cast wonderful and the dialogue frequently clever, but there's not much of a story to Gosford Park (it all peters out in the last act, anyway, with a series of anticlimaxes and revelations that just aren't that revealing). Lack of a story has never stopped Altman from making great films before, but the sense of loose play and anything-can-happen that normally enlivens and elevates an Altman film is at a curious minimum here. There's too little of the quirky flourishes, creative staging and sharp editing that we associate with the director, and, frankly, it doesn't even feel as if much improvisation — i.e., risk taking — went on here. Gosford Park is rarely less than entertaining, but the film frequently seems a touch too rigid in a way that's at odds with this unique filmmaker's real strengths.
This article appears in Jan 9-15, 2002.
