I Am Sam

The movie I decided to watch is I am Sam starting Sean Penn as Sam Dawson and Dakota Fanning as Lucy. Penn is a father with a developmental disability of Autism raising his seven year old daughter; Fanning, after her mother decided to abandon them. Despite his mental limitations, Sam has a group of friends with some kind of developmental disabilities, who all support Sam in everything as well as the neighbor friend Annie, who cares for Lucy whenever Sam is not able to. Although Sam provides a loving and caring home for Lucy soon his mental disability is surpassed by his daughter’s. Lucy soon becomes embarrassed of her father because she is teased by her classmates and does not want to admit she more intellectually advanced than her father. On Lucy’s birthday a social worker comes and takes Lucy away to a foster home where Sam is only allowed two supervised visits per week. Devastated by the loss of his child, Sam takes his friend’s advice and seeks a lawyer to get custody of Lucy. While in her foster home Lucy runs away during nights to be with Sam, although he returned her. During the final trial, Sam has an emotional breakdown after the opposing side told him that he is no capable of raising a child. Though, the family that planned on adopting Lucy returned her to Sam on the condition that they will help him raise her.

The main topic the director/producer addressed was that besides having a disability the bond that Sam and Lucy had was way stronger than his disability. The importance of children residing with their birth parents, and how people can work together as support systems for families with unique challenges when they put the needs of the child first, by never discouraging a person’s capabilities based on the disabilities.

My view on this film is people always try to put down a person with any kind of disability, thinking because of the disability a person is incapable of functioning like “normal” people in society. Although I do believe if a person...