I Am Sam

858 Words4 Pages
In the movie "I am Sam" by Jessie Nelson, a story about a middle age autistic man who has an unplanned baby with a homeless woman who then leaves him alone with his new daughter, Lucy, at a bus stop, Sam raises Lucy as the only father that can provide in spite of his disability, he uses his friends as a support network. Regardless his right to be a parent is challenged by Social Services who setup a court case against him for custody of Lucy. After this he finds a lawyer named Rita who specialises in family cases and ironically has trouble raising her son, Willy. The main idea shown in this film is the idea that Our ability to parent is not defined by the level of our intelligence. This is shown throughout the films and highlighted in the following places with the following techniques: When Rita (who is quite intelligent) has parenting troubles with Willy and makes errors in judgement about how to raise him (Uses diegetic sound). When Sam's emotional intelligence, sympathy and love for others is emphasized in a Court Scene (uses extreme close up). And finally when Sam and Lucy are in iHop and Bob's Big Boy, two different restaurants (uses the lighting color of mise en scène). We are shown the idea of 'Our ability to parent is not defined by our level of intelligence' in the film; in the scene in which Rita, Sam's probono lawyer, is talking to Sam about her experience with her son where she bought him a brand new "Raptor Scooter" to bribe him into doing what she says, she uses bribery to manipulate her son but Willy still ignores her because she ignores him commonly throughout the film. By neglecting her son and assuming she can buy his love, she is making an extremely bad decision about how to deal with Willy. The technique of diegetic sound (dialogue between two characters) shows this idea because she openly discusses Willy to Sam, but she never has tried to
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