In I Am Sam, Sean Penn plays a mentally challenged adult fighting for the right to raise his own daughter.

Are you crying yet?

Penn plays Sam, a man with the inellectual capacity of a seven-year-old. He works at a coffee shop. He has cared for his little girl, Lucy (Dakota Fanning) almost single-handedly since she was born.

People help Sam when they can. A neighbour (Dianne Wiest) teaches Sam to feed Lucy on schedule by marking time for him according to which show is on TV. On TV?

By the time the social workers show up to take Lucy away, we breathed a sigh of relief and got up to leave.

But there was more.

Sam gets a hotshot lawyer to represent him in court in his attempt to have custody of his own daughter, who is now seven years old, going to school and keen to stay with her father. The lawyer, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, has her own problems, which include a worthless marriage, a bad relationship with her own son, and the lousy dialogue in I Am Sam.

All this womanish angst is summed up in scenes that show Miss Pfeiffer driving too fast and guiltily stuffing marshmallows into her mouth, straight from the bag. No cliches here.

Anyway, like everyone else, Pfeiffer's cold lawyer character slowly thaws and becomes A Better Person just being around Sam's good heart and truthful nature. Sam's good heart and truthful nature and dire overacting pretty well crowd everything else off the screen.

Worth watching in the otherwise heinous and maudlin I Am Sam are Dakota Fanning, the child actor who plays Lucy, and the gang of actors (Doug Hutchison, Stanley DeSantis, Joseph Rosenberg and Brad Silverman) who play Sam's buddies. That two of these actors have real-life disabilities tends only to underscore Penn's histrionics and confirm that Hollywood really is an irony-free zone.

On top of everything else -- and there's plenty -- I Am Sam has a stupid script. The audience is asked to hope for the good-hearted and wise Sam in the matter of his daughter and simultaneously feel sympathy for Sam in the situations where he cannot cope -- situations far less taxing than parenthood. You'd think filmmakers would know that you can't suck and blow at the same time.

I Am Sam was co-written and directed by Jessie Nelson. She is also responsible for Stepmom and The Story Of Us.

Extrapolate at will. (More on: I Am Sam).

(This film is rated AA)

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