ADAM - 2009

It was a little past half-eleven when I returned home, the hour not particularly ungodly but sufficient to weigh upon a man who has endured the double toll of a long day’s labour and the performative dance of dinner with a client. My spirit, like an old dog weary of fetch and chase, longed for the quiet companionship of solitude. I switched off my telephone with the air of one casting aside the burden of the world, and I latched my laptop shut as though it were a portal to a realm of ceaseless demand, best sealed until morning.

In the stillness that followed, I lingered before my writing desk—on it perched two tempting volumes: the collected essays of John Berger and the elusive, uncollected works of Henry James, both staring back at me with a scholarly sort of provocation. Yet it was not to these that I turned. Like a half-forgotten letter from an old friend, I remembered a film—Adam—resting quietly in my DVD stack, long postponed and now suddenly insistent in memory.

Having tasked the house help with the solemn charge of popcorn from the microwave (for rituals must be observed, even in solitude), I sank before the flickering screen and pressed ‘play’, letting the world of Adam unfurl itself. What first caught my attention was the character himself—peculiar, yes, but not performatively so; a man whose strangeness is rendered not with exaggeration but with an affectionate realism. He lives in a Manhattan apartment that breathes order—macaroni dinners arranged like soldiers, clothes aligned with the reverence of a monk’s habit—suggesting a mind that seeks sanctuary in sameness.

We are told he is an engineer, though it is not his profession that marks him, but his disposition. He is grieving, it seems: the double loss of father and employment having left him adrift. Into this fragile stability enters Beth, a wistful young woman with a vocation for children and a heart unversed in the strange dialect of Adam’s affection. He, an amateur astronomer; she, a teacher of little minds. And slowly, what appears at first a passing connection unfurls into something more significant—something like wonder.

Now, the portrayal of Adam by Hugh Dancy must be spoken of with a degree of reverence. It is no easy task to depict a man living with Asperger’s syndrome—a condition not marked by outward spectacle, but by inward misalignment. Where others have erred on the side of theatricality, Dancy achieves something altogether finer: he does not play Adam; he is Adam. And there is a scene—both comic and piercing—in which he tells Beth, “I’m not Forrest Gump, you know.” The line, tossed lightly, bears beneath it a whole philosophy of difference: that every soul who lives outside the ordinary is not thereby a caricature or a lesson, but a human being longing—however awkwardly—for connection.

Though Adam falters in the social dance—he cannot read the unsaid, he flinches at emotional ambiguity—there is about him a recognisability so acute, it surprises. For who among us, however neurotypical we presume ourselves, has not found words elusive, meanings murky, or the ache for closeness hard to express? In this way, Adam ceases to be merely a character, and becomes—almost—a mirror.

The film does not merely present romance; it charts its evolution. It is not a fairy tale of perfect matches but a meditation on the tender, sometimes painful process by which two imperfect souls come to accept, and even cherish, one another’s flaws. There are lessons here, though they whisper rather than shout, and the subplot involving Beth’s parents adds another register—a quiet, moral counterpoint, like the minor key in a symphony.

There are, to be fair, moments that do not quite harmonise. One in particular—a scene in which Beth is startled by Adam’s candid admission of arousal—teeters on the edge of awkwardness. Yet even here, honesty rescues what convention might have ruined. Less defensible, perhaps, is a jarringly abrupt scene involving police intervention at a school—a moment that felt more like an editorial misstep than an artistic necessity.

Still, Adam is not a film that panders to predictability. It draws you in, not by spectacle, but by sincerity. And while I do not count the Oscar a sure indicator of excellence (indeed, I often think it praises least where praise is most due), I cannot help but wish that the committees who claim to discern greatness would attend more closely to performances like Dancy’s—renderings not wrapped in theatrical garb, but robed in truth.

The film reminds us, gently but unmistakably, that love is not a matter of physical nearness alone. It is transformative. It makes us more ourselves, not less; more human, not merely happy. And how rare it is in cinema—or indeed, in life—to find a portrayal of love so unselfconscious, so unencumbered by the tyranny of perfection. It permits growth not only together, but apart, which is perhaps the truest kind of love there is.

Max Mayer, the director, must be commended for walking that narrow line between realism and resonance, never tipping too far into melodrama. And though I confess myself unfamiliar with Seamus Tierney’s previous work, his cinematography here captured Manhattan not merely as a city but as a kind of poetic terrain. It reminded me of my cinematographer friend Ravi K. Chandran, who understands—as all great artists do—that genius resides not in grandiosity, but in the quiet precision of simplicity.

And so Adam lingers in the mind long after its final scene. Not because it shouts its message, but because it whispers something we recognise, perhaps from childhood, or perhaps from some hidden chamber of the soul: that we are all strange, all longing, and—if we are fortunate—redeemed not by perfection, but by love that sees us truly and stays.