When all that matters is love – I am Sam

I am Sam, USA, 2001, 132 min.

D: Jessie Nelson

Cast: Sean Penn, Michelle Pfeiffer, Dakota Fanning

„It’s about patience and it’s about listening and it’s about love.” – this is how Sam Dawson (Sean Penn) defines his relationship with his daughter, Lucy (Dakota Fanning). As beautiful and as typical-for-happy-families it might sound, the Dawsons are not even close to a regular family.

Sam is a grown up, but he was born with a mental disease, having the brain capacity of a seven year old. He hooks up with a homeless woman with whom he has Lucy. He ends up taking care of her all by himself, because his partner abandons both of them as soon as they leave the hospital. With a little help from his friends (also mentally retarded) and from a neighbour, Sam doesn’t face any problems in taking care of Lucy. This goes until the child is seven and realizes she is way more intelligent than her father. From that moment, Lucy continuously pretends to have a bad memory and to be unable to read or write properly, in order not to overtake his father. The teachers at school report this issue to the autorities, which intent a custody trial.

Desperate by his situation, Sam tries to find a good lawyer to represent him. He reaches Rita Harrison (Michelle Pfeiffer), a successful lawyer who is forced by the circumstances to take the Dawson case pro bono, in order to keep a proper image of herself between her lawyer colleagues. During the whole trial, the two struggle to prove the fact that love has nothing to do with one’s intellectual capacity, and that a retarded man can also provide to his child a normal life. In the middle of the trial, when Lucy is sent to an orphanage and later to a foster house, Sam begins to learn about life outside the crystal globe of supreme happiness. Meanwhile, Rita also gets to learn an important lesson about how you can live more than happy even without luxury, if you have somebody beloved to share every day with.

Rita and Sam are very different, but their lives intersect in a moment when they desperately need each other (in Rita’s case, this necesity isn’t obvious until she becomes involved in the trial with both her mind and soul, trying to save Sam’s child). The two come from different environments, they belong to different social categories, and neither one of them really knows the other one’s world. She is beautiful, successful and lives a luxurious life, having everything she ever wanted. However, her family life is a mess: her husband is cheating on her, and his son barely talks to her. Sam, on the other hand, works at a Starbucks, lives in a small flat and has a mediocre living. Even so, he is the happiest man on Earth for having Lucy, who represents his entire universe.

Sean Penn performs in the strongest, most emotional and lifelike way possible. Even if his character wouldn’t say a single word during the whole movie, the way Sam looks at his daughter would be enough for the viewer to understand everything. From the most common moments, when Sam spells the words trying to read the same old book to Lucy, to the sadness that overtake him in the court, when he realizes he is about to lose his child, Sean Penn’s character offers the audience the strongest feelings. His difficulties in talking and thinking, along with the most common gestures, are deeply studied by the actor, in order to create a credible story and character. For this performance, Sean Penn was nominated to the Best actor in a leading role category at 2002’s Oscars. Michelle Pfeiffer’s performance, also difficult because of its complexity, becomes trully great when seeing it in an antithesis with Sean Penn’s. The anger, the hysteria and her permanent nervousness of Rita Harrison become heavy by their intensity.

To Dakota Fanning, the role she had I am Sam is the first in a long row of roles that had the purpose of prooving her talent and her professionalism. This performance was followed by others, in movies like Nine Lives, Hide and Seek, War of the Worlds or Dreamer.

Even without agreeing with critiques saying that the movie should be taken as an important lesson of life, I can easily accept the fact that the movie is a very precious sample of simple happiness and unconditioned love. And it is definitely a movie you would like to see again.