I Am Sam

This movie is about a man with the mental capacity of a 7 year old. He has a daughter with a homeless woman who takes off at the first chance she gets. He is crazy about the Beatles and names his daughter Lucy Diamond. He raises her with a little help from his friend next door. As she gets older, she starts having a hard time at school because she doesn’t want to become smarter than her dad. She gets taken from him and he “hires” a lawyer to do his case pro bono. In the course of the case, he loses and Lucy is placed in a foster home. During the trial, his lawyer learns a lot about love and what that means in her life. In the end, even the foster family falls in love with same.

This movie is one of my favorites, but even so, I watched it again for this project. I had forgotten just how good this movie is. I like that at least one of his friends in the movie actually has a disability. I liked this movie for a number of reasons, one of them being that they show how someone with a disability can be treated in everyday life, but also in the courtroom, which was new for me. It was also really good because it showed that while someone with disabilities can look or act differently than what we expect, they aren’t very different when we get to know them. Having worked in various jobs with people with disabilities for the last decade I was able to appreciate that.