I am Sam

I Am Sam - A Review of Parent and Child Relationships

I Am Sam ' is a powerfully touching film that tells the story of a parent and child 's love for one another . It shows that love is pure , and that no matter how great the mind is , love is even greater

The film 's protagonist is Sam , a mentally-challenged adult with a mental age of 7 . Sam has a daughter , Lucy , with a prostitute who left them . Sam works at the local Starbucks to support Lucy , and everything is going along well until

Lucy turned 7 , because she already surpassed her father 's mental abilities . This creates problems , because early on we see that Lucy is precocious and inquisitive , and she is no longer satisfied with her father 's nonsense answers to her questions . When she starts wanting to read more difficult books than what Sam reads to her she fakes having difficulty reading so as not to offend her father and make him feel inferior

On Sam 's part , even when he sees that Lucy is already growing up , he tries his best to support her the best way he knows how . Lucy does not see this yet because she is still a child , but she understands that her father is different , but she loves him because he is a very loving father who takes her out to the park and to eat pancakes and generally takes good care of her . Later in the film she is embarrassed when her classmates tease her that her father is a retard that she denies him and tells them that she is adopted . The authorities take her away from Sam and later on sent to a foster home

When the authorities take Lucy away from him , he does everything he could to get her back . He even gets the fearsome lawyer Rita to help his cause . Rita , a successful and stringent lawyer who values winning more than anything , decides to take Sam 's case just to prove that she is not as selfish as she looks . Through the course of helping Sam , she realizes that Sam is a good father , that Sam 's mental inadequacy has not hampered his ability to love and care for his daughter at all . That in fact , he is a better parent than she is . When at first she sought to win Sam 's case because she did not want to lose , eventually Rita sympathizes with Sam 's cause

Sam visits Lucy regularly , and Lucy realizes that she wants her father back , and that she is going to fight back just to be with him , even if she is smarter than him , even if the world laughs at her for having a retard for a father . At this moment , Lucy has matured , and although she is just 7 , she has taken responsibility not only of her own actions , but also decided that she will take care of her father when he could no longer take care of...