I Am Sap, Sap I Am

ll you need is love. Well, that, a good editor and a mighty dosage of willfully suspended disbelief. I Am Sam has a message, an important message, and it's trying real hard to get you to agree with it.

But the effort is just not enough. I Am Sam deals with parenthood under threat and duress: Tough, career-driven lawyer Rita Harrison (Michelle Pfeiffer) has to defend the parental rights of mentally handicapped Sam Dawson (Sean Penn). Who's to say, the movie asks, that the mentally handicapped are unfit parents when responsible adults can't even do the job? The answer is that love is the vital component of paternal skill.

It's a utopian ideal, but one that might have stood on its own were it not for writer/director/producer Jessie Nelson's reluctance to challenge its veracity. Love triumphs--but only through ignorance, convenience and sentimentality.

Penn puts in a convincing performance as he fights to get his daughter (Dakota Fanning) back from the evil social services system. But no amount of devotion to character can save him from this sticky sap.

In the meantime, the best character in the film is Penn's next-door neighbor Annie (Dianne Weist), a piano-playing agoraphobe who rallies against demons of her own, as she tries to come to terms with an emotionally exhaustive world. Her relative obscurity in the film's second half is indicative of Nelson's broader failure to develop a unique and articulate understanding of the challenges that face both the mentally ill and the rest of us as well.

The product placement in this film is particularly egregious, especially for a production that pretends to be an Oscar contender. Starbucks, Target, Baskin Robbins and Tab can all check off their "PC mentally handicapped endorsement" quota.

But that's I Am Sam all over: Hollywood product for the Academy racks. A forgettable piece that merits none of its Oscar buzz, I Am Sam establishes Nelson (The Story of Us) not as a sharp social commentator but as a leading figure in mawkish sentimentality.