Actors - I am Sam

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	Actors - I am Sam

I am Sam is a 2001 film about a mentally retarded man, Sam Dawson, singularly raising his seven year old daughter Lucy . Although Sam provides a loving and caring environment for Lucy, she begins to mentally overtake him, and questions arise about Sam’s ability to care for Lucy. It stars Sean Penn, Michelle Pfeiffer, Dakota Fanning, Dianne Wiest, Loretta Devine, Richard Schiff and Laura Dern.

It was written by Kristine Johnson and Jessie Nelson and directed by Nelson.

Penn was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor.

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 Sarah McLachlan and Ben Folds, to cover the songs for the soundtrack.

Tagline: Love is all you need.

Synopsis

Sam is a well adjusted man with a mental age of 7. He has a great support system consisting of five men like himself, and one smart lady neighbor (Annie, a piano-playing, German recluse).

He works at Starbucks bussing tables (Starbucks helped with the production of the movie). He's popular with the customers, whom he addresses by their name and their favorite coffee ("that's a wonderful choice"). 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. He brings her over 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 watch her.)

Life is great for Lucy Diamond Dawson, preschooler. Her single dad is the most wonderful loving parent a girl could have. Although he has a tendency to satisfy her curiosity with nonsense like "mustard is yellow ketchup" and "some men are bald because their head is shiny and their face goes up extra high".

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 (about the baby bat) 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 dotes on her, taking her to the park and to IHOP (every Wednesday, because "Wednesday is IHOP night").

When they go to Big Boy for a change, Sam makes a scene because he can't get the same kind of French pancakes he's accustomed to. At the school Halloween party, he dresses like a Sixties Beatle but embarrasses his daughter by becoming the center of attention.

Other kids tease her because her dad's a "retard". She tells one boy she was adopted. This causes a crisis at her birthday party, and the child case worker (whose visit Sam didn't anticipate) culminates in Lucy being taken away from Sam. A judge allows him only two, supervised 2-hour visits per week.

Sam's friends recommend he hire a lawyer, Rita (Michelle Pfeiffer). He shows up in her office and starts spilling out the story, while she juggles coffee orders to Patricia (her assistant) and two phone calls (one from Willy her son "on line two"). When she hangs up the phone and turns to Sam, he reminds her, "I think your son is on line two." So we see that he's no dummy. He's socially rather high-functioning: more together in many ways than his high-class, respected lawyer whose marriage is falling apart and whose son hates her. The contrasts couldn't be sharper.

He surprises Rita at a party, and mortified at being caught talking to a man who looks like a janitor she announces that she's taking his case pro bono as all her colleagues trade unbelieving looks.

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