Editor’s note: Michael Medved brings American history alive in a 24-tape set which presents America’s story from the founders’ perspective. Available now at WorldNetDaily’s online store.
Very good movies can sometimes convey very bad messages – and that’s certainly the case with “I am Sam,” the brilliantly acted, undeniably touching new tearjerker starring Sean Penn and Michelle Pfeiffer. While masterfully manipulating audience emotions, “Sam” glorifies two of the most dubious and dangerous of contemporary ideas on child rearing.
Sean Penn plays the title character, a sweet-tempered, mentally challenged single father with a menial job at Starbucks who struggles to raise the daughter left behind from his brief relationship with a homeless woman. After the precocious child (played by blonde, angelic newcomer Dakota Fanning) celebrates her seventh birthday, it’s obvious that she’s more intelligent than her father. If we somehow miss the point, the script tells us several times that he’ll never advance beyond the mental capacity of a 7-year-old.
Inevitably, social workers threaten the tender relationship between father and daughter by trying to place the little girl in a more suitable home. In order to keep custody, Sam secures the services of a stressed-out yuppie lawyer (nicely played by Michelle Pfeiffer) who ultimately learns more from her child-like client than he ever learns from her.
In the ensuing legal battle, there’s never the slightest doubt about the film’s sympathies. As the official press materials for the film declare, the mentally challenged father and his glamorous advocate “struggle to convince the system that Sam deserves to get his daughter back and, in the process, fuse a bond that results in a unique testament to the power of unconditional love.” To drive that theme home, ads for the film feature the tag line, “Love is All You Need.”
This is nonsense, of course – sweet and sentimental nonsense, perhaps, and politically correct nonsense, probably, but nonsense just the same. Certainly, love plays an important role in raising a child, but kids need – and deserve – much more. If unconditional love were the only requirement for effective parenting, then cocker spaniels could raise children better than most adults.
Like Sam in the movie, a good dog can provide unquestioning adoration and playfulness, but it cannot provide the guidance, supervision and adult example that children need. You don’t have to be a genius, or even of average intelligence, to provide this grownup perspective, but you can’t be severely disabled like the character in the movie.
With its ringing endorsement of Sam’s parental potential, the film advances the obnoxious but trendy notion that children require no adult influence. This plays into the already potent temptation for mothers and fathers to play the role of pals, rather than parents and protectors. Isn’t it grand, we’re supposed to say to ourselves, that Sam plays on the seesaw with his little girl as her intellectual and emotional equal.
Yet even in the film’s own idyllic terms, this equality can’t last. The child is already a better reader than her father, and obviously more sophisticated in comprehending the world around them. This gap will only expand as she matures and grows and he does not, but the movie suggests that there’s no real problem with a child, in effect, raising her father. In this sense, the film echoes another hip notion particularly popular in Hollywood: that kids know best, and childhood always trumps adulthood.
In nearly all movies of the last 20 years centering on children or teenagers as the main characters, adults come across as pathetic bumblers, or worse. Consider the insensitive grownups in the classic “ET,” or the profoundly embarrassing dad played by Eugene Levy in “American Pie.” In the brilliant thriller “The Sixth Sense,” the well-intentioned psychologist (Bruce Willis) is so clueless that he doesn’t even realize he’s dead.
In film after film, not to mention most TV series, it’s children – not adults – who represent the source of all wisdom and enlightenment. In this sense, the idea of a little girl taking care of her mentally challenged father only represents the natural extension of a powerful (and powerfully wrong-headed) idea already unshakably enshrined in Hollywood orthodoxy.
Since kids know best, the entertainment industry regularly conveys the notion that it’s more important for adults to learn to be children than for children to learn to be adults. In fact, the big budget Steven Spielberg/Robin Williams turkey, “Hook,” (among other movies), made that idea its explicit theme. In “I am Sam,” it’s Michelle Pfeiffer’s workaholic lawyer who represents the corruption of adulthood, with all its standards and demands and schedules and routines and lack of authenticity and spontaneity.
No one can argue with the idea that recapturing more of the wonder and joy of childhood could serve to enrich our busy, work-obsessed lives, but contrary to popular belief our own kids need us to play the distinctive role of grownups more than they need additional playmates. Oddly enough, Hollywood encourages adults to emphasize their inner child, at the same time that it attacks childhood itself with an abundance of unsuitable material aimed at young audiences.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, behaving like a reliable, mature authority figure isn’t always fun, and it’s certainly not fashionable – but it’s an indispensable element in the upbringing of any healthy child.
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Medved brings American history alive!
24-tape set presents nation’s story from the founders’ perspective. Now available from WorldNetDaily’s online store.
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