It's easy to dislike a movie because of its genre. Everyone has his or her personal tastes when it comes to things like horror or Westerns. The real problem comes when one confuses which genre a film is trying to fall into. People would find problems with \The Godfather"" if they tried to apply to it the rules of a backstage musical. So, it's important to understand a movie like ""I am Sam"" as a melodrama, not a drama, and judge it from that standpoint.
Melodrama differs from drama on a very basic level. Drama keeps things like character motivation and raw emotion hidden. It becomes a puzzle, a struggle to find the truth in a situation, because no one wants to give away his or her hand. Melodrama, though, plays its cards face up. It treats emotions like statements of fact; they become the dialogue instead of motivating the dialogue. And, just in case the audience doesn't catch these cues, the music, or ""melody,"" swells up to tell them how to feel.
""I am Sam"" certainly knows the rules of the melodrama. Sean Penn plays a mentally handicapped father of the bright 7-year-old Dakota Fanning. When the state takes away his daughter, Penn seeks out the help of Michelle Pfeiffer, a high-powered attorney neglecting her own son. She's too busy and uncaring to take the case until her colleagues goad her into ""doing pro bono."" Even with Pfeiffer on board, though, it's a losing battle.
The morals of this story don't come at the end, like some Aesop's fable; they're stated explicitly throughout. The opposing counsel stands up and objects to Pfeiffer's using the case to work through her own issues. Later, Pfeiffer tells Penn that she's gotten more out of the case than he has. And, just in case the audience doesn't catch these cues, Beatles covers swell up to tell them how to feel.
However, with all the rules of melodrama telling it what to make explicit, ""I am Sam"" does find other things to keep hidden (with surprising skill, considering its director, Jessie Nelson, is the writer behind ""Stepmom"" and ""The Story of Us""). For instance, some elements of the plot go missing. Penn's neighbor, Dianne West, is a shut-in, a trait unexamined until a court scene requires brief mention of it. There is a missing sex scene between Penn and Pfeiffer, bookended awkwardly by references to it. And, the ending remains vague, more of an emotional victory than a definitive answer about the court case. Maybe this lack of solid plotting mimics Penn's confusion, in the same vein as shaky camerawork and quick editing. Maybe not.
More interesting are the meanings in Penn's monologues. When asked a question he can't respond to eloquently, Penn repeatedly tells stories about the lives of the Beatles. The movie shows he recognizes the concepts, the eternal truths of the situation. Ineloquence in dialogue doesn't matter when there is a sound, complex metaphor. Even more interesting are the quotes, cited or not, from ""Kramer vs. Kramer."" In the courtroom scene and at the end of the film, lines from another movie convey best what these characters feel. In this age of post-""Pulp Fiction"" films-referencing-films, that is very intriguing. These metaphors and quotations, the moments when the melodrama gets replaced with complexity, seem to be the only time when the movie is really honest about emotions.
It's an interesting experiment, but an imperfect one. ""I am Sam"" presents a neat think piece on the genre of melodrama at the expense of certain basics like plot and character depth. Penn, Pfeiffer and Fanning hand-in impressive performances (Fanning especially), but for what? Their roles as actors get sidestepped as the movie replaces struggling emotions with plays on metaphor and knowing plagiarism. ""I am Sam"" is strange and intriguing and deserves a deeper look, but it still isn't a great movie.
I always try to give recommendations at the end of a column, but I tend to dislike melodramas shepherding my emotions. However, if you like catharsis from movies like ""I am Sam,"" try ""Dancer in the Dark."" That's the only other movie I can think of that tries so hard on an intellectual level to produce an exact emotional response.
