As a coming of age story that is not just sexually explicit but also tragic, An American Affair may well be too heavy for younger teens. But then again, that, in part, is the point of the movie. Adam (Cameron Bright), a D.C. middle school student, exclaims to his father (Noah Wyle): You tell me the truth when it suits you. You lie to me for my own good? Catherine never lied to me.
Having befriended their new neighbor, Catherine Caswell (Gretchen Mol), Adam knows more about her, including of her losses and her affair with President John F. Kennedy, than his parents do. Yet, they try, as parents do, to shield their son from what they assume he cannot understand. It’s ironic that Adam’s parents are D.C. journalists. Not only do they judge Caswell based on her reputation, they agree to turn Caswell’s diary, which Adam has been keeping in his bedroom, over to the C.I.A., sealing Caswell's fate and contributing to a C.I.A. cover-up. How's that for truth in journalism?
This movie not only comments on inter-generational relations but also offers a glimpse of how private lives and politics become inextricably intertwined in D.C. adult social life. Moreover, adolescents engage in the same dangerous games as their adult role models, including flirtations, accusations, provocations, and violence, on a scale that has less public consequence. These children would become their parents, unless circumstances intervene, as they do here.
This movie avoids simply moralizing and explores, instead, individuation and the development of individual morality. Adult dishonesty pervades both personal and public sphere in An American Affair, and dishonest adults hide easily behind society's moral code by capitalizing on public demonization of its victims. Innocence becomes very hard to hold onto in a world of lies, when the liars are powerful political players.
Hope lies in the individual's artistic expression. The portrait of Adam that Caswell painted and Adam pieces together in the movie's closing scene renders a picture of Adam as she understood him, a picture Adam can love, and a picture that perhaps his parents will come to understand.
