Alyssa Rosenberg manages to express — whereas I failed — why the portrayal of autism in Adam bugged me:

Adam, a 2009 romance about the relationship between a Beth, a privileged young woman, and Adam, a young man with Asperger’s syndrome, is even blunter in its uses of autism as a moral barometer for neurotypical people. Among the early signs Beth has that Adam’s brain works differently from her own is his reluctance to give her his laundry card when she forgets hers, and that he doesn’t offer to help carry her groceries up the stairs. At the end of the film, the audience is supposed to see that Adam’s made progress because he offers to help a new coworker with a pile of boxes. It’s a weirdly servile view of Adam’s growth, measuring his progress solely in his utility to other people. Beth is supposed to be rewarded for her goodness in even deigning to date her strange neighbor. She dumps Adam for not loving her in the way she wants, then uses a story he told her as the basis for her first book. It’s as if by briefly resisting her monstrous father, who wanted her to leave Adam from the start, Beth has done something heroic.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201002u/autism-movies