From its promise of an instructive, girl-meets-unlikely-boy tale of wonder to the astronaut suit antics, twinkly, hipster-uplift soundtrack, and deadly Forrest Gump joke, the trailer for Adam, Max Mayer's ballad of love and Asperger's, said two things to me: strap on your adorable crash helmet and get ready to learn.
Of course a marketing department plays--or in this case overplays--the cards it has, but in doing so set off the seemingly coveted indie crowd's exquisitely sensitive quirk-alert. No matter: Adam's natural audience, in fact, is the old couple cohort, the graying matinee-goers just looking for a little sweetness on a Sunday afternoon, a couple of pretty faces, and a vague whiff of relevance to revisit the next time they get their granddaughter on the horn. If the dreamy eyes of the older folks exiting the screening I attended are any indication, Adam will be just fine for being shunned by the cool kids: their parents will find it easier to forgive the film's self-conscious charms, as well as the educational medicine it adds, one assumes, to help the sugar go down.
The rest of you would be right and wrong to let that trailer keep you away from Adam: the quirk is indeed in enervating effect, but the main problems with the film, ostensibly a new take on the traditional New York romantic plight of mis- and disconnection, are more fundamental, if not totally fatal. As written by director Max Mayer, the script seems divided against itself: the tentative bond and recognizable grapplings between Adam (Hugh Dancy), a recently orphaned, high-functioning computer engineer with Asperger's, and Beth (Rose Byrne) a privileged teacher and self-proclaimed "emotional retard," suggests Asperger's as a fresh metaphor for an old problem. We're all emotional retards, in other words, so get over it, get on with it -- and God help us.
But Adam also wants to bring a meticulousness to its depiction of living with Asperger's, notably in several jarring Q&A sessions, Dancy's slightly more nuanced performance, and the refusal to give the couple more chemistry than Adam's condition could sustain. The film's unromantic thuds of accuracy are of course at odds with its wispy metaphor and invocation (if not total embrace) of the magical man-child powering so many cinematic treatments of mental disability. Each of these approaches dilutes the other, and added to them is a convoluted sub-plot involving Beth's parents (Peter Gallagher as an embattled businessman and Amy Irving as his, yes, long-suffering wife) that takes the film in a third, unsatisfactorily integrated direction involving trust and compromise in close relationships.
Despite this muddling of the material and several blips in the screenplay (How would a schoolteacher, not to mention a veteran of the NYC dating scene, not immediately recognize Asperger's? And why is Adam, who can't maintain eye contact, so blasé about sex?) in several scenes the film achieves an unexpected thematic traction. When Adam discovers that Beth has told him a relatively minor fib, for instance, he unleashes the reaction--a grief-stricken, scalp-clawing meltdown--most of us have but are forced to play off when a lover tells that first, niggling lie. Beth blithely admits to the breach, and is in turn docile in accepting a betrayal within her family; it's a contrast that scrutinizes the emotional plea bargaining we "adjusted" adults accept as the fate of any relationship, and questions which one of them is really out of touch with her feelings.