Stereotypes In I Am Sam
I AM SAM
My first reaction? Wow! Another Hollywood attempt at portraying people with developmental disabilities. Interesting movie.
Sean Penn pleasantly surprised me in his portrayal of Sam Dawson, a young man with special needs who fights to regain custody of his seven-year-old daughter. Sure, some of the disability stereotypes are present in this movie: goofy clothes, bizarre laugh..., but there is also depth to the character. We can see Sam's frustration at not understanding the world around him, his difficulty pulling out the salient features when telling his story, his rigidity with routines, his perseveration on details. These are traits many of us are familiar with and demonstrate that the screenwriters did some research in this …show more content…
The pathetic depiction of all higher functioning characters in the movie including the expert witnesses as being incompetent parents is an annoying and unnecessary ploy to make Sam look like the only empathetic parent in the film. Michelle Pfeiffer is nicely cast against-type, as Sam's over achieving "bitch" lawyer. During the courtroom scene when Pfeiffer realizes that her client is becoming confused and overwhelmed, she objects to "compound sentences." However, Pfeiffer's own scenes with her client, more often than not, are riddled with vocabulary and concepts way above her client's capacity to understand. "All you need is love" is a simplistic and shameless attempt to pull at the heartstrings of movie goers. How often in our clinical work do we hear abusive parents declare their love for their child? Having a disability doesn't preclude you from loving your children. Workers who support parents with developmental disabilities attempting to deal with the challenges of parenthood can tell you that their clients' failures to effectively and safely parent their children have little to do with love. They have to do with complex, abstract concepts such as: empathy, judgment and insight. They have to do with parents trying to get their own basic needs met, so that they have the energy and capacity to parent their children. As children get older, they need attention paid less to their physical needs and more help dealing with emotional and social challenges of everyday life. This is often a difficult challenge for parents with developmental disabilities to deal with, especially when they may have been able to cope more easily with the child's more basic needs when
My first reaction? Wow! Another Hollywood attempt at portraying people with developmental disabilities. Interesting movie.
Sean Penn pleasantly surprised me in his portrayal of Sam Dawson, a young man with special needs who fights to regain custody of his seven-year-old daughter. Sure, some of the disability stereotypes are present in this movie: goofy clothes, bizarre laugh..., but there is also depth to the character. We can see Sam's frustration at not understanding the world around him, his difficulty pulling out the salient features when telling his story, his rigidity with routines, his perseveration on details. These are traits many of us are familiar with and demonstrate that the screenwriters did some research in this …show more content…
The pathetic depiction of all higher functioning characters in the movie including the expert witnesses as being incompetent parents is an annoying and unnecessary ploy to make Sam look like the only empathetic parent in the film. Michelle Pfeiffer is nicely cast against-type, as Sam's over achieving "bitch" lawyer. During the courtroom scene when Pfeiffer realizes that her client is becoming confused and overwhelmed, she objects to "compound sentences." However, Pfeiffer's own scenes with her client, more often than not, are riddled with vocabulary and concepts way above her client's capacity to understand. "All you need is love" is a simplistic and shameless attempt to pull at the heartstrings of movie goers. How often in our clinical work do we hear abusive parents declare their love for their child? Having a disability doesn't preclude you from loving your children. Workers who support parents with developmental disabilities attempting to deal with the challenges of parenthood can tell you that their clients' failures to effectively and safely parent their children have little to do with love. They have to do with complex, abstract concepts such as: empathy, judgment and insight. They have to do with parents trying to get their own basic needs met, so that they have the energy and capacity to parent their children. As children get older, they need attention paid less to their physical needs and more help dealing with emotional and social challenges of everyday life. This is often a difficult challenge for parents with developmental disabilities to deal with, especially when they may have been able to cope more easily with the child's more basic needs when