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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
ADAM Writer/director Max Meyer doesn’t make his romantic drama credible when, from the get-go, the New York City of his film settles for picture-perfect clichés. Autumn in New York was made for the camera, but only in the movies and TV could a young public elementary school teacher, Beth (Rose Byrne), afford to live in a large one-bedroom brownstone apartment (hello, Friends). But the reason why she steadfastly pursues a relationship with a passive young man with Asperger’s syndrome, a type of high-functioning autism, never makes sense, but feels instead like two characters were shoved into a premise. Her overprotective dad (a still smarmy Peter Gallagher) drops into a dinner conversation the fact that Beth is an only child. She’s therefore open, needy, and, already on the rebound, an easy crutch for Mayer to explain why, from the moment she moves into her new apartment building, she stops on the stoop to chat with someone visibly tightly wound and socially awkward, Adam (Hugh Dancy)—in Manhattan, of all places. Adam doesn’t discern what people are thinking, or pick up signals or inferences. Without a mental self-censor, he speaks the blunt, and sometimes brutal, truth, so Beth has to do all of the heavy lifting, figuratively speaking. To say he’s high maintenance is putting it mildly. Speaking in robotic tones and focusing more on his internal thoughts than the person he is speaking to, Adam draws out concern, not lust. Socially, he’s an adolescent, not a man. But her attraction only makes sense because he’s played by a dreamboat. Adam may be a handful but at least he’s hot. (If you’re going to be the poster man/child of any disability, you’d want to look like Hugh Dancy.) Even so, the first question to come to mind for the audience isn’t what is wrong with Adam, but why is Beth so chatty and desperate, and apparently without friends. It’s as if he’s her last chance, with no straight and single men on the horizon. (Adding to what’s essentially an old-fashioned story, she’s pushing 30.) The fact that their courtship remains clean-cut and chaste, until she literally has to take him by the hand, is convincing, however. When the film begins, Adam has returned home from his father’s funeral to their Pottery Barn-furnished apartment, with a freezer stuffed with only Amy’s Macaroni & Cheese. His sole guardian figure is a folksy fount of wisdom (Frankie Faison), who gives Adam pointers on guy talk—stick to two subjects, women and the weather—and advice on how to make the moves on Beth. So one night, in his effort to impress her, Adam hangs upside down outside washing her windows—in an astronaut space suit. The film is so cuddly that the audience will feel a slap in the face when Adam finally stops behaving like a gullible choir boy and rants and raves. It’s a little too late. Like the rest of the screenplay, it’s either too much of this or too much of that. To the script’s credit, you are kept in the dark until
the end as to how far the ever-patient Beth will be tested, but you also
get the feeling that even Mayer didn’t quite buy their relationship in
the first place. He buries it under extraneous circumstances when Adam
is fired from his job at a high-tech toy company, and Beth’s daddy
issues resurface: an accountant, he’s been charged with financial fraud.
In the last half hour, during his dramatic trial, I had to ask myself,
Adam who? But the film is really about Beth, not Adam, which is just as
well since it deals with their relationship, as well as his condition,
with no more depth than a movie of the week. Kent Turner
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