Uticopa Blog

The British actor Hugh Dancy is taking an innovative route to stardom. He stars in ‘Adam’, a romantic comedy about Asperger’s syndrome – the first ever.

What makes this film medically-accurate is its ability to show adult relationships and the difficulties encountered when the man lacks that all-important empathy.  Picture a typical marital scene where, after a blazing row, the woman finally calms down and says that little word ‘Sorry - it was all my fault’.  In a ‘normal’ relationship, the man would empathise with her emotional feelings at this point and say something like ‘no, we’re both to blame really.  I’m sorry too.’

But when the man (and typically Asperger’s is far more common in males) is on the Asperger’s spectrum, logic would then kick in.  He would think, well, she’s said sorry so that means she’s admitted she was wrong.  So, problem solved. Let’s move on.

The film is set in New York. It tells the story of how Beth is attracted to the fragile, handsome, ‘odd’ chap who lives downstairs from her. Adam is awkward socially, a staunch avoider of eye contact and obsessed with astronomy.  Crucially, Adam also seems devoid of the intuitive faculties required to understand the subtleties of flirtation.

What’s particularly innovative is that the script doesn’t immediately open with ‘here’s a man who’s got Asperger’s, diagnosing him from the word go’.  You wonder about him from the start, but you get to see him as an individual, before the clues begin to build up.  And, unusually, it’s a romantic comedy.

The director says that what fascinated him about Asperger’s is that one of the big deficits is that it makes it difficult to put yourself in another person’s shoes.  As opposed to more profoundly autistic syndromes, people with Asperger’s desire the same connection to other people that all ‘neurotypicals’ do.  So, Adam has the desire for a relationship, but without the talent for it.  Ironically, that’s something we can all empathise with.

Currently men with Asperger’s outnumber women four to one. This is because it affects the male ‘systems’ part of the brain, rather than the female ‘emotional’ areas.

The deeper a relationship gets, the more we expect our partner to mind-read.  Women, in particular, don’t think they need to actually say they need a hug or why they might be feeling down. Women expect their partners to know that by now. Unfortunately, the deeper a relationship gets, the harder it is for a partner with Asperger’s to work this out.  They just can’t because they’re unable to empathise emotionally, full-stop.

Why this film is useful is that audiences are going to sit there and things are going to click in their brain.  They’re going to look at their partner and think ‘why, that’s just like you’.  In this age of IT specialists, and the fact that men with Asperger’s are inevitably drawn to the world of logistics, you can guarantee that if you work with computers you will know people with symptoms just like Adam.

After initial screenings, many were the people who came forward to the director and said ‘you really got that right’.  And parents of children who were displaying symptoms were gratified by the film. They really needed to know what their children would be like when they got older, and how they would deal with relationships.
Asperger’s is normally a difficult syndrome to diagnose because symptoms can be displayed along a wide spectrum, from the mild to the extreme – where it becomes full-blown autism. 

So, watching a film like ‘Adam’ on general release from 7 September is a good vehicle to show mainstream audiences not just the difficulties experienced by men with the syndrome, but also how to identify people with mild to medium symptoms of the disease.