COMIC DRAMA: 1hr 39min
STARRING: Hugh Dancy, Rose Byrne
Love is in the air: Byrne and Dancy
Adam (Dancy) is a 29-year-old electronics engineer who lives in calibrated solitude in Manhattan. Brilliant and fearful, he is in the world yet not of it, isolated as if through glass by Asperger syndrome, a highly functional type of autism. “My brain works differently from neurotypicals,” he explains to his vivacious new upstairs neighbour Beth (Byrne), to whom he has taken a fancy.
Beth, a teacher who wants to write children’s books, is at ease with Adam even when his strangeness takes overwhelming shapes. Yet although he is handsome in a rumpled, Hugh Dancy sort of way, and Dancy never exaggerates his condition, Adam is childlike and moody. His relationship with Beth sits uncomfortably on the credibility scale in a narrative straddling two disparate tracks. Can Adam shape up as a boyfriend? How will Beth’s smoothie father (Peter Gallagher) fare with his legal woes? And does a catalogue of miscommunication make a movie worth watching? Up until the final act I would have said maybe not. But it’s then that all the prickly strands start to knit together.
