Everyone in this world has questions. Within them, however, is always an in-built quest for self-exploration. Perhaps that strong yearning is more pronounced when one discovers that the so-called accepted truths were actually phony. Searching for parents is an all too familiar scenario in both real life and film. Be it through abandonment, adoption, or loss, we are all driven by a fundamental need to search for our origins. Is it true that they were great people? They gave us up for adoption, why did they have to sever all ties? Will I be like them when I grow older? Numerous questions reign over one’s thoughts, most of which are unanswered unless of course one can speak to them. At least in a realistic view that is likely to be the only option. But that still does not mean there will be any satiation of the desire to simply be there and know.
The storyline in Adam The First centers on the eponymous teenage boy (Oakes Fegley), who helps his parents James (David Duchovny) and Mary (Holly Bonney) and lives in a forest. In an excellent short scene where James is with little Adam (Harrison Hughes), Duchovny very subtly and calmly explains that he is not his nativity but ensures that he is loved and cared for always. He also explains that his parent did not want him and left him as a child and his mother was dead. From a distance, one can only regard such a perception of the world with respect for what is yet to come. Later, James tells Adam that one of three Jacobs Watterson had to be his biological father.
Adam The First can, with a few adjustments, be described as a road movie where the aim is to interrogate the three Jacob Watterson’s (Eric Hanson, Jason Dowies, Larry Pine) across fixed locations punctuating the moving storyline. It is more about the boy. And in this regard, the movie works out perfect. Oakes Fegley is truly a rising star who takes this movie on his shoulders and is able to meet his many scene partners at exactly the right level.
His desperate, wearied performance carries the viewer through some rough patches of pacing and audio decisions. More specifically, the score from Irving Franco and Michael Grazi can be described as overly loud, jarring and filled with unnecessary melodrama, all of which appears to be in dissonance with the narrative being developed.
This is obviously a deeply personal film for director (and also writer, producer and composer) Irving Franco. But it becomes apparent that he can be rather scatterbrained in how he documents a single movie. Some beautiful scenes seem disjointed, never mind how breathtaking they are. He and his cinematographer, Daniel Brothers, display their talents throughout the film, most particularly in the scenes that depict Adam’s mental challenges during the quest. Also, with regards to slow moving pans of the camera, there is always a sutch that once crossed renders all effect useless. Franco appears to surpass this metric, to such an extent that it becomes unpleasant for the viewer and the amount of required patience seems to be more than reasonable.
This notwithstanding, in as much as attempts are made to ensure the film is vivid and interesting, the quiet parts are clearly the most effective. Almost all of the scenes that can be remembered focus on the characters. Every encounter with the three possible fathers is touching, and each for different reasons. One shows the anger of a just person, another is about compassion, the third one is about palliating an offence. But all these pale in significance to one scene between Adam and a character played by the significantly underused T.R. Knight.
In this case, both the spoken and the unspoken words are significant, which is executed brilliantly by both Knight and Fegley. If you were not really on board by this time, it would be hard not to be moved by this particular moment.
For all of us, there is an Adam whose journey may be long and challenging, but the end does not matter. Each one of the people encountered along the way, even those with no answers to offer, have their share of impact. For some questions, even the right one will simply be inadequate. Our odyssey is ours, which only we can traverse while remaining receptive to other people’s narratives as well. There are many things that this film shows us, including that there are many stories and in fact many more than there should be, and hype is often disproportionate to fact. Now, it is not in our control and in all probability never will be, to be objective. What we can do, or perhaps what is the only thing we can do, is look for the best version of ourselves.
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