Chris Knipp
08-03-2009, 08:22 AM
Max Mayer: ADAM (2009)
Review by Chris Knipp
Honesty as dysfunction
Adam is the bittersweet love story of the eponymous hero (Hugh Dancy), who has Asperger's Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism, and elementary school teacher and aspiring children's book author Beth (Rose Byrne), who moves into Adam's building shortly after his father has died leaving him alone in a big apartment. Dancy is a young English actor (doing an impeccable American accent here) notable for charm and talent. Australian Rose Byrne is sweet, and the film avoids cliché or excess in depicting a developmental disorder that includes rigidity, addiction to routine, and inability to perceive emotions or sense irony, humor, or polite lies.
Adam consumes identical frozen macaroni and cheese dinners his father has left in the fridge and goes back and forth to his job as an electronics engineer for a toy company. He meets regularly with Harlan, (Frankie Faison), an old friend of his fathers, who gives him homely advice. Adam needs a push to talk about anything but space -- his greatest enthusiasm --not only with Harlan eating lunch on a park bench, but with Beth, whom he starts running into all the time. Adam's personal planetarium and a visit to a raccoon family in Central Park wow Beth, on the rebound from an affair with a cheesy investment banker pushed on her by her cheesy accountant father (Peter Gallagher), who winds up indicted for corporate malfeasance.
The very real barriers between the autistic person and the rest of humanity are certainly understated. Sometimes Adam's fear of social situations fits with the experience of any shy person. For Beth, his awkwardness and reserve, which lead to many gently comic moments, are offset by the fact that he's not only brilliant and cute, but touchingly interested in her. His only big meltdown comes when she tricks him into meeting her father and mother (Amy Irving), who understandably have serious reservations. He is eventually furious at having been lied to to stage the encounter. His fury frightens her. Otherwise the couple move gently toward love, though when sex finally comes, the camera looks away.
The indictment of Beth's father is one plot engine. The other comes when Adam is let go from his job; his bosses love him but find his solutions too costly. He refuses to leave the big flat, and must be rehired to pay the mortgage. So he must apply for jobs, and interviews are not his forte. Eventually he must make a big decision about where to go with his life.
The screenplay's most thought-provoking conceit is that Beth and Adam both learn equally important lessons from each other. She shows him how to show emotion and physical affection -- and behave more or less naturally in a job interview. But, by example, he teaches her that with the prevalence of polite deceptions in everyday life, honesty is a value that gets forgotten.
The ending and coda are a bit disappointing and anticlimactic but nonetheless positive. The film could have been more positive and still delved more realistically into the harsher challenges of an Asperger's relationship. Rain Man put autism out there but failed to show that Asperger's people can fully function, with some allowances (which many of us need) in the "real world." Petter Næss's Mozart and the Whale, the romance of two Asperger's young people (Josh Hartnett and Radha Mitchell), is a fuller and more realistic depiction of autism and relationships, whose leads, unlike Dustin Hoffman's Raymond Babbitt, can be seen not improbably as lovers. The beauty of Adam lies above all in the subtle understatement of Dancy's sensitive performance and the way the film avoids the maudlin and showy elements of films about mental dysfunction like I Am Sam. Overall it may seem that the way Adam is written by Mayer (who scripted as well as directed) softens Asperger's too much, but the characteristics are there, and the softening allows one to identify more easily with everything he's going through.
Review by Chris Knipp
Honesty as dysfunction
Adam is the bittersweet love story of the eponymous hero (Hugh Dancy), who has Asperger's Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism, and elementary school teacher and aspiring children's book author Beth (Rose Byrne), who moves into Adam's building shortly after his father has died leaving him alone in a big apartment. Dancy is a young English actor (doing an impeccable American accent here) notable for charm and talent. Australian Rose Byrne is sweet, and the film avoids cliché or excess in depicting a developmental disorder that includes rigidity, addiction to routine, and inability to perceive emotions or sense irony, humor, or polite lies.
Adam consumes identical frozen macaroni and cheese dinners his father has left in the fridge and goes back and forth to his job as an electronics engineer for a toy company. He meets regularly with Harlan, (Frankie Faison), an old friend of his fathers, who gives him homely advice. Adam needs a push to talk about anything but space -- his greatest enthusiasm --not only with Harlan eating lunch on a park bench, but with Beth, whom he starts running into all the time. Adam's personal planetarium and a visit to a raccoon family in Central Park wow Beth, on the rebound from an affair with a cheesy investment banker pushed on her by her cheesy accountant father (Peter Gallagher), who winds up indicted for corporate malfeasance.
The very real barriers between the autistic person and the rest of humanity are certainly understated. Sometimes Adam's fear of social situations fits with the experience of any shy person. For Beth, his awkwardness and reserve, which lead to many gently comic moments, are offset by the fact that he's not only brilliant and cute, but touchingly interested in her. His only big meltdown comes when she tricks him into meeting her father and mother (Amy Irving), who understandably have serious reservations. He is eventually furious at having been lied to to stage the encounter. His fury frightens her. Otherwise the couple move gently toward love, though when sex finally comes, the camera looks away.
The indictment of Beth's father is one plot engine. The other comes when Adam is let go from his job; his bosses love him but find his solutions too costly. He refuses to leave the big flat, and must be rehired to pay the mortgage. So he must apply for jobs, and interviews are not his forte. Eventually he must make a big decision about where to go with his life.
The screenplay's most thought-provoking conceit is that Beth and Adam both learn equally important lessons from each other. She shows him how to show emotion and physical affection -- and behave more or less naturally in a job interview. But, by example, he teaches her that with the prevalence of polite deceptions in everyday life, honesty is a value that gets forgotten.
The ending and coda are a bit disappointing and anticlimactic but nonetheless positive. The film could have been more positive and still delved more realistically into the harsher challenges of an Asperger's relationship. Rain Man put autism out there but failed to show that Asperger's people can fully function, with some allowances (which many of us need) in the "real world." Petter Næss's Mozart and the Whale, the romance of two Asperger's young people (Josh Hartnett and Radha Mitchell), is a fuller and more realistic depiction of autism and relationships, whose leads, unlike Dustin Hoffman's Raymond Babbitt, can be seen not improbably as lovers. The beauty of Adam lies above all in the subtle understatement of Dancy's sensitive performance and the way the film avoids the maudlin and showy elements of films about mental dysfunction like I Am Sam. Overall it may seem that the way Adam is written by Mayer (who scripted as well as directed) softens Asperger's too much, but the characteristics are there, and the softening allows one to identify more easily with everything he's going through.