YMMV / i am sam

• Awesome Music: The entire soundtrack is covers of Beatles songs, what did you expect? Special mention to Ben Folds' version of "Golden Slumbers" and Rufus Wainwright's version of "Across The Universe." Both are pure Sweet Dreams Fuel!
• Critical Dissonance: In spite of the critics being most unfavorable to it, the film actually has respectable audience ratings on sites like Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb and Letterboxd.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: While Sam's disability is never outright specified, his highly methodical thoughts and actions, narrow-minded obsession with The Beatles, occasional struggles with verbalizing his thoughts, apparent sarcasm-blindness, poor responses to stress, and displays of stimming when emotionally overwhelmed imply that he is meant to be severely autistic. However, his characterization plays up so many stereotypes of the disorder that it veers heavily into Hollywood Autism territory.
• Glurge: Many viewers felt that the movie was not only blatant Oscar Bait, but way too emotionally manipulative and anvilicious to truly work.
• Heartwarming Moments: While many moments blend with Tearjerker, several parts are unconditionally sweet. A standout scene is where Sam figures out that Lucy has been hiding her reading ability from him. Lucy tells Sam she doesn't want to read if he can't read, but he says that he loves seeing her read and grow and that it makes him happy.
• Parody Displacement: Nowadays the only time someone ever brings up the film is in reference to being mentioned in Tropic Thunder and Drawn Together. If people do watch it, it's likely to see what, at least according to Tropic Thunder, makes this a failed example of Inspirationally Disadvantaged that contrasts more successful examples like Rain Man and Forrest Gump.
• Questionable Casting: The eponymous character, who is intellectually disabled and possibly on the autism spectrum, is played by Sean Penn, who is neurotypical. As time moves on and sensibilities towards the portrayal and treatment of the developmentally disadvantaged become more nuanced, Penn taking the role in lieu of someone who actually is mentally disabled has been viewed as undermining the point of the film and its supposed sympathies. While the argument can and has been made that such casting can be excused on matters of practicality and production logistics, the fact the rest of the movie is seen as grade-A Glurge makes the decision underlined with exploitative connotations, most infamously with the likes of Tropic Thunder using i am sam as the epitome of "using mental disability as Oscar Bait".
  • Critics and audiences also found it in bad taste that Sam's circle of friends were all played by men who really were disabled in some fashion, meaning Penn has to pretend to be so right to their faces.
• Strawman Has a Point: More than a few critics and viewers couldn't help agreeing with the "bad guys" that, no matter how wonderful of a person Sam was, he wasn't capable of raising a child. Having said that, it's clear at the end that the foster family is still in the picture, even if Sam is legally the father. Presumably they help out with the various things that he can't handle by himself, but the movie didn't make that explicit.
  Roger Ebert: You can't have heroes and villains when the wrong side is making the best sense.
• Values Dissonance: Terms such as "retarded" and "mentally disabled" are thrown around numerous times, including from Lucy's classmate Connor.
  Conner: What's wrong with your father, why's he acting like a retard?
  Lucy: He is.

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