Why Adam Sandler feels the need to relive the glory daze of Billy Madison, I honestly do not know but here comes Reign Over Me which comes from Madison 23 studios, which is the drama equivalent of Happy Madison studios like shitting is the harder, healthier equivalent of diarrhea. Also known for Happy People, Madison 23 only seems to make films where the main character is as down in the dumps as humanly possible so he has a legitimate reason to unleash the kind of rage that I’m convinced is a clause in every contract that Adam Sandler signs.
In a move that was borderline offensive, Reign Over Me forces us to sympathize with 9/11 victim Charlie Fineman (Adam Sandler) as he wallows in misery over the loss of his entire family (including his dog) to the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center. Everybody claims that he’s suffering from shell shock (fuck you, “PTSD” users), though it’s obvious that his disconnection from society is self-inflicted. It’s not that his mind can’t process the world around him anymore, it’s that Charlie doesn’t want it to.
As a result of this disconnect, Charlie sits alone in his apartment, redecorating his kitchen a billion times while playing Shadow of the Colossus, living off of an unrealistic amount of settlement money he got from 9/11. Originally a dental school student, Charlie gives up his life and future and just stays on autopilot, though for some reason his maturity seems to have been put on hold too and his character has de-evolved to that of a 13 year old boy (another clause in the contract). Take out the 9/11 thing and this is Billy Madison if the story were real and Billy was kicked out of his father’s house with enough money to live on, but became a manic depressive as a result of not having Mr. Penguin to chase around.
On the flipside of this is Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle), his college roommate who did finish school and despite getting the life that he wanted with his own office and a wife and kids and white picket fence, is too much of a pussy to be in control of any of it. Constantly being ridiculed by his partners, whipped by his wife (not in the good way) and sexually harassed by his patients (in the good way), Alan is in need of a disconnect and here he meets Charlie and desperately tries to reconnect with him so he can have a friend to just get away with.
Reign Over Me tries to convince us that the bond that is created during these meetings is strong enough to enrich the lives of both Charlie and Alan, but fails miserably in this regard. Alan’s “Cowardly Lion” character doesn’t gain courage and Charlie’s “Scarecrow” character doesn’t get a brain (yet, a third clause in Sandler’s contract), but the two still skip along the yellow brick road together holding hands in their little dream world anyway. It’s a friendship that happens instantly; it doesn’t evolve and build up and therefore doesn’t work. Charlie originally doesn’t recognize Alan, but for some reason contradictory to his character, he plays along anyway and the two develop a friendship that looks awkwardly similar to a new romance minus the sex (or maybe that’s in the unrated version). Even the music makes you think they’re going to make out at some point.
As Charlie gets more involved in Alan’s life he becomes that friend that usually accompanies the main male lead in rom-coms, serving as some fake psychiatrist whose only role is to explain the story so the retarded boyfriend who is stuck seeing a rom-com on date night can understand what’s going on and have enough talking points to convince his girlfriend he was paying attention so he can get some at the end of the day. As he gets comfortable having a friend again, Billy Madison…errrr…Charlie breaks out of his shell, making sure we are notified of every erection, confusion, and awkward life discovery while proving to us that this is a man who could never have gotten into dental school or been married with children. He’s just not a believable character; his story is too outlandish and only seems to exist because Sandler can’t not play anything other than a post-pubescent, pre-adolescent douchebag using his temper-tantrums to get cheap laughs, except in this movie we’re supposed to feel bad for them instead of shake our head in disgust.
This movie tries to be sentimental and caring, meaningful and moving, but flat-lines because it thinks that Charlie’s tragedy needs to be answered with college humor, but Sandler fails again to recognize that the only way to get an audience comfortable with laughing is to get them comfortable with smiling first, and Reign Over Me doesn’t give you any reason to. This isn’t a fun journey of two men re-discovering and re-inventing themselves, this is a trash tale of two losers (though losers in different ways) using each other as mental fuck-buddies so they can avoid dealing with their own drama, then magically deciding that they’re both ready to move on because that’s the only climax that’s satisfactory. They both defy their characters so much for the sake of pushing the plot that the movie sails beyond the horizon of poetry and enters into the realm of “bad writing.”
With a mish-mash of cheap gags, pale drama, and just a crappy feeling all the way through it, Reign Over Me gets 5 dustbusters out of 10, which is really generous considering that I was so pissed at the end of it, I had to watch Zoolander as a cinematic palette cleanser. Please stop making dramas Adam Sandler. You did good in Spanglish because you weren’t allowed to write any of it, but that doesn’t mean you get to make your own fucking studio and try the genre for yourself.
No comments:
Post a Comment