A love facing great awkwardness

by Roger Ebert

Adam seems to be a good catch for a young woman. He’s good-looking, works as an engineer, has a big, comfy apartment, is fascinated by astronomy and knows lots and lots of stuff. However, he has Asperger’s syndrome. Beth has never met anyone like him. He behaves in social situations with an honesty that approaches cruelty and doesn’t seem much aware of that.

"Adam," the story of a romance involving this unlikely couple, would seem even more unlikely if Beth herself weren’t self-centered. Perhaps it takes a man even less outgoing to inspire her nurturing side. At first Adam simply offends her with his baffling objectivity. Then he explains, "I have Asperger’s" and she understands. If she knows the term, it’s surprising she hasn’t already arrived at that diagnosis herself.

Asperger’s is sometimes described as high-functioning autism, although some argue the conditions are not related. The syndrome produces people who can be quite intelligent and functioning, but lack ordinary social skills or insights. Adam (Hugh Dancy) does not know, for example, that when a proud young mother shows off a cute new baby, he should ooh and aah. There is not a single ooh or aah in him.

Yet he feels a perplexing attraction to Beth (Rose Byrne). He even — what’s this? — experiences ual feelings for another person for perhaps the first time in his life. Beth is touched. Adam’s condition draws her out of her own self-absorption. When he faces a daunting job interview, she coaches him: Look the other person in the eye. Seem interested. Don’t go on autopilot with one of your streams of information. Look like you want the job.

In a way, she could be coaching him about how to behave toward herself. And indeed such coaching is one of the forms of therapy used with Asperger’s. He responds slowly, awkwardly, with breaches of behavior that at times infuriate her. The film somehow extracts from their situation a sweet, difficult relationship, although it’s a good question how she finds the will to persist.  www.130q.com

The film complicates their story with one about Beth’s parents, Rebecca and Marty (Amy Irving and Peter Gallagher). They’re concerned that she broke up with a suitable young man and now brings Adam home. They’re also worried by a court case charging that Marty, an accountant, misrepresented a client’s books. There are even courtroom scenes, touching on this separate drama I’m not sure really relates to the central story.

Adam seems completely isolated, except for Beth and his only other friend, Harlan (Frankie Faison). Harlan gives him lifts, has lunch with him, advises him, instinctively understands him. These two accept each other without questions, and Adam needs Harlan, although it’s unclear if he realizes just how much.

Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne, he from England, she from Australia, have seamless American accents, and make a pleasant couple. You may remember her as Diana, the grown-up daughter of the little girl at the beginning of "Knowing," who wrote down the numbers. As her parents, Irving and Gallagher are always plausible, never over the top, showing that her father, too, has had his difficulties in communicating, and her mother knows all about that.

The film has a storybook ending — literally, from a children’s book that Beth writes. It’s unclear how much of a storybook lifetime the two will have together. "Adam" wraps up their story in too tidy a package, insisting on finding the upbeat in the murky, and missing the chance to be more thoughtful about this challenging situation.

Adam's Ample

 
Adam is not like other guys. He's the smartest person in any room he enters, handsome without a trace of ego, sweet almost to a fault. But there's something else that sets him apart: He has Asperger's Syndrome, a high-functioning type of autism.

Writer/director Max Mayer handles the topic with care in his second feature film "Adam," and doesn't aim to make the title character, played convincingly by Hugh Dancy ("Evening"), a walking punch line. He has high regard for his socially-impaired protagonist and sees to it that you will, too.

The film opens with a funeral for Adam's father, his caretaker for the past 29 years. His day-to-day life consists of eating the same meal every night (macaroni and cheese), working as an electronic engineer at a toy company and gazing longingly at the stars. Then he meets Beth (Rose Byrne of F/X's "Damages"), a sophisticated writer with a broken heart, who recently moved into his building. They are not the likeliest of matches, but Cupid's arrow hits in mysterious ways. www.130q.com

From the get-go, their connection is strong but the relationship has several strikes against it. For starters, as much as they try, they will never truly understand each other. ("My brain works differently than neurotypicals," he points out.) That means that while he can be romantic, which he is on several occasions -- most notably during a late-night outing in Central Park to watch the raccoons -- he can't emotionally connect in the same way. He also can't read social cues without guidance and is prone to fits of anxiety, the kind that lead him to slam his head on a mirror when the status quo gets disrupted.

But perhaps their biggest obstacle is Beth's father (Peter Gallagher), an outspoken accountant accused of fraud, who thinks she can do better. "You marry an investment banker, you can do whatever you want," he says. The whole father-daughter storyline conjures up flashbacks of "Say Anything," and Amy Irving's small-but-touching role as the wronged wife is heart-tugging. The show belongs to Dancy though, who brings a raw, nervous energy to Adam, like he's waiting for a bear to attack him at any given moment.

"Adam" works because it feels genuine and doesn't take regular detours into melodrama -- at times it's rather funny in a subtle way. The lovebirds bond because they each need something the other can provide: Adam wants someone who can help him better function in society; Beth craves a man to be nice to her and tell it like it is. Their dynamic suggests mutual care and respect, though it doesn't exactly have "long-term potential" scribbled all over it.

There aren't many fictional movies out there about autism – a grand total of one springs to mind – and "Adam" is a respectable, albeit imperfect, attempt to turn that around. While its heart is always in the right place, some subplots linger too long (dad's courtroom drama) and a few scenes seem to exist solely to cutesy up the trailer (Adam in a spacesuit cleaning her windows). But as Adam himself proves, there's more to life than perfection.