Chattanooga Pulse

This week’s selection in the Arts and Education Council’s Fall Independent Film Festival is the 2009 Sundance hit Adam.  The film soared at the January festival, winning the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan prize for “an outstanding feature film focusing on science or technology as a theme.”  Sounds awfully dry—so it may come as surprise that Adam is actually a romantic comedy about two strangers trying to connect, one a little stranger than the other.

Adam Raki is a handsome young man with a twinge of mystery about him.  Slogging through a menial day job in front of a computer screen, his real passion is astronomy, a subject that fills his mind so much it overflows into simple conversation.  He’s led a sheltered life in a New York apartment with his father, but when his father dies and a new neighbor moves in next door, Adam begins an emergence from his solitude.

The new neighbor is Beth Buchwald—a beautiful young woman, a lifetime New Yorker, and an elementary teacher who dreams of writing the perfect children’s book.  Fascinated by Adam and his quirks, she takes it upon herself to pull Adam into the outside world and help him live life through interacting people instead of by ignoring them.

The new seems so easy until Adam tells Beth that he suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, an autism-like disorder, the cause of his social interaction problems but also the reason for his genius.  Beth is still attracted to Adam and the consequences of her love lead to the fearful question of whether being in love with a disabled person is worth facing the trials that inevitably come.

Shot on location in New York City, Adam takes its love of the city more seriously than the characters of its story.  The relationship of the characters to their city is the most comfortable aspect of the film, but the way they relate to each other (and the way the camera relays their relationships) is strained and fraught with unease.

Why is it that films about mental illness make us so uncomfortable?  Some would say it’s because mental illness is a terribly disconcerting subject that few of us are prepared to deal with.  Granted, but in Adam’s case the problem is much different.  The way in which Adam deals with Asperger’s is the most troubling thing about the whole affair.

Adam is introduced as a character with a painful past—his father/caretaker has just passed away leaving him alone—but other than this context, we’re left to believe that Adam is nothing more than a quirky dude with a planetarium in his living room, who somehow knows where to find a family of raccoons at Central Park in the dead of night.  Though we know of his affliction, his pain seems to come strictly from his circumstance, not his condition.

So when Adam has the obligatory (yet sudden) emotional outburst triggered by this condition, a turning point in the script that slices an emotional gap between him and Beth, we feel more embarrassed for the filmmakers than for Adam.  By making Adam a stereotype rather than a living, breathing character, they distance us from the pain they would like us to feel for him and put us in danger of laughing instead of crying.

The pretty face of Hugh Dancy (Confessions of a Shopaholic, King Arthur) doesn’t help the situation either.  Dancy never sheds his charming, socially adept persona to become something other than himself.  He tries and rarely succeeds, making the spare moments where Adam is silent and alone the most powerful ones of all.

Still, it isn’t all mush. The beautiful Rose Byrne (seen at her best on FX’s Damages) holds her own as Adam’s innocent and sympathetic lover.  The supporting characters are all refreshingly complex, each with stories of their own that the script weaves together effortlessly with Adam’s.  There’s also a beautiful little ending that wraps all the film’s disparate elements into a neat little package, a flourish that made this critic smile and redeems some of the more saccharine parts of the script with a fleeting dose of narrative realism.

But Adam leaves no lasting mark.  The humorous diversions are nothing fresh and the dry wit never fuses with the urgent drama to present a sobering thought about the reality of living with Asperger’s Syndrome.  It may be a nice-sounding recipe, but it’s cooked all wrong.

Adam
Directed by Max Mayer
Starring Hugh Dancy, Rose Byrne. Peter Gallagher
Rated PG-13
Running time: 99 minutes