3 Ways of Expressing Love
At the beginning of the film, Mike lives with his foster family. Although his foster father sends him to a white school, treats him carefully, he fails to involve Mike into his family. Then Mike chooses to leave this family and sleep in school gym until he meets Leigh. Leigh takes good care of Mike, makes postcards with the photo of her family and Mike, helps him find his mother, and treats him like her own son.

It is unfair to tell who holds more love for Mike and who cares more. The point is the ways of expressing love are totally different, therefore the results are totally different. While his former foster families cannot express their love for Mike and expand the distance between them, Leigh is patient and insists her love for this boy.

Another example will further explain the importance of the right way of expressing love. Mike enters the white school with the help of coach who realizes the potential talents of football in Mike, however, he doesn’t perform as well as expected in the playground. The coach teaches him in conventional ways and trains him a lot, which doesn’t work in Mike. For the introverted boy with poor sociability, it is really hard to remember all the game rules and work together with other players.

However, Leigh finds the best way to stimulate Mike to explore his potential after an accident. In order to celebrate Mike’s birthday, Leigh and her husband decide to buy him a car as a gift since he has always dreamt of possessing a car. At receiving the gift, Mike is so excited and decides to take an airing with his younger brother SJ. Sadness and gladness succeed one another. Their car crashes with another car because of their carelessness. When Leigh gets to the car accident, she finds that SJ is still OK but she cannot find Mike. Then she finds him in the corner burying his head in his arms and badly hurt. It turns out that Mike tries to save SJ and reaches his arm to protect SJ. Leigh is shocked by Mike. At the same time, an idea comes to her that for Mike, it is his duty to protect his family. If he can treat those players in the ground as his family, try to protect them and pass the ball, then he is bound to play well. Then she tells Mike that they are his family, what he has to do is to protect them. Since then, he could cooperate with anyone in his team.

The coach and foster mother Leigh share the same goal but they use different methods to help Mike accept the game and rules. What has been ignored by the coach is Mike is a special child, he is different from any other player and he is afraid to get touch with those white students, so it is almost impossible to get him through those complicated rules and work with them like a team. However, Leigh realizes this and injects him with the idea of family, which can be easily understood by Mike and stimulate his protectionism for his family and team.

It is obvious that the right way of showing love sometimes can have a direct effect on children’s development. Then the problem is to choose the best way in order to produce the best result. Just as it is written in Erich’s book: it requires knowledge and effort. This attitude--that nothing is easier than to love-- has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The process of learning an art can be pided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. (Fromm, 1956:03-04)

4 Barriers
In the film, Leigh and Mike are two people who are not supposed to relate to each other. But it is as if fate brings them together, giving them an opportunity to know and help each other. Since then, the relationship has productive and significant to both of them. Perhaps at the very beginning, Leigh’s help to the helpless boy wandering in the rain stems from spontaneous benevolence, since she has always been a kind hearted woman. But as the film shows, she is not doing a good deed just once and for all. She persists with her help, and this is not a smooth path. Both of them are to encounter some difficulties and even barriers mainly because of their gap in background and social status. 电影《弱点》英文论文(3):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_2963.html