Adam Sandler in Anger Management: Implosion
Published April 25, 2003
The central irony of Anger Management is that although Adam Sandler's character can't assert himself no matter how badly he's treated, a state of paralysis that has blocked his love life as well his career, he's arrested on a plane for assaulting a flight attendant he barely touched and assigned by a judge to round-the-clock therapy with a specialist in getting a grip on rage. Jack Nicholson as the therapist explains that there are two kinds of angry people: explosive and implosive. Because the implosive kind lets his anger build up he may be more dangerous to others in the end, if less of a pain on a daily basis. Sandler's specialty has been to play the implosive kind at the point that hard knocks have so fissured his crust his anger turns explosive. The classic moments are the quavers in the voice that suggest responses the nice-guy face can't express, and then the overcompensatory outbursts, singing "Love Stinks" at a wedding party, for instance, in his best role so far in The Wedding Singer (1998).
At times American pop culture strangely rewards and withholds from an artist for the same work: The Wedding Singer was a career-making hit for Sandler and yet no one noticed how unforced and sensitive an actor he could be (or believes me when I say it). Rent it and check out his line readings in the nightclub scene when he keeps getting Matthew Glave as Drew Barrymore's fiance to expose how coarse and dishonest he is. Sandler has an incredible touch with the tricky, duplicitous dialogue. There's a glint in his eye because the sad-sack protagonist is sneaking one past his confident rival; this is how the implosive type gets and savors revenge.
Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love (2002) finally got Sandler the reviews he deserved for The Wedding Singer; it was the same kind of role only in a much more consciously artistic (i.e., critic-pleasing) movie. But Sandler's performance wasn't as good in Anderson's movie precisely because the director exerted so much stylistic control. Punch-Drunk Love is a conventional delayed-coming-of-age romantic comedy but shot in a suavely discordant style, a Bruce Nauman objet d'art of a date movie. Oddly for a sketch comedian, Sandler isn't at his best in movies when his performing is most stylized (unlike Jim Carrey). He's far more distinctive playing low-stress guys breaking in high-stress situations, his way in to the characters through their unassumingness, their lack of ambition, their small-voiced desire for things just to go on as they are when that's already past impossible.
Anger Management is a considerable step down for Sandler in, once again, the same sort of role--the adolescent boy who has to learn to stick up for himself, not just verbally but physically. Here he has to take on the bullies in his life--all of them, from his childhood nemesis to his rivals in love and his current boss--in order to win the girl. The story is a romance that connects the successful wielding of violence to adult male sexuality. I think it's accurate about men's lives, to a point, the problem is that it requires the star to play a stunted, repressed boy for most of the running time.
- Adam Sandler in Anger Management: Implosion
- Published: April 25, 2003
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- Section: Video
- Filed Under: Video: Comedy, Video: Romantic Comedies
- Writer: Alan Dale
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Well, this is what makes criticism interesting. It's true that Robby in The Wedding Singer is written as no more than a sketch character, but the very slackness of the movie is what lets Sandler fill out the conception, to make a man of a caricature. And I agree that Punch-Drunk Love is a far more artfully made movie than The Wedding Singer, but Anderson's art is very deliberate in a way that restricts Sandler. Sandler doesn't function as the star of Punch-Drunk Love the way he does in The Wedding Singer--Anderson is the star of Punch-Drunk Love. And to my mind, the jokes, if you can call them that, dealing with buying food for the travel coupons, and the various kinds of toilet cleaners, and the harmonium he picks up off the street, don't rely on what Sandler can bring to the party. Even the shot of him kicking out the sliding glass door is effective because it's beautiful, and shockingly timed and edited. You say that you see "real angst, real torment in his character," and I agree that Anderson wrote it that way, but I think your phrasing is telling: it's in the character first and foremost, and then Sandler plays it as written. That felt different to me from The Wedding Singer, the very slapdashness of which allowed Sandler more freedom to play off his instincts as an actor (and not just as a sketch character). I respond a lot to that kind of freedom.
I also hesitate to identify profundity with angst and torment, especially in comedy. Anderson brings that into his picture by a simple grafting technique. In The Wedding Singer the romantic-comedy hero has to overcome a rival who is rotten in a slapstick-melodrama way. That's pretty straightforward. In Punch-Drunk Love the romantic-comedy hero has to combat an allegorical predator out of a film noir nightmare. Anderson fuses this unsavory suspense plot with the romantic-comedy conventions, and it all holds together, but it's an odd kind of hybrid that by itself could account for the feeling that Sandler is stretching. But once again I would argue that it's in the script not in Sandler's acting per se. Anyway, Punch-Drunk Love certainly is a well-crafted movie and it doesn't surprise me at all that people respond intensely to it. (The artwork on your home page indicates one reason why you would like that gorgeously coloristic movie.) I just want to point out that something admittedly as junky as The Wedding Singer might contain a performance of unexpectedly high quality, of higher quality than performances in far better movies.
Thanks for reading and taking the time to write.
Thanks, Alan, your response made perfect sense. I guess it's probably more true that I enjoy Punch Drunk Love for its very PT-Anderson-ness than anything else - being a big fan of Magnolia as well. I think what really took me off guard about PDL is the very fact that Sandler could pull off an essentially non-comedic role so well, but as PT Anderson said, he wrote that role for him because that's what he sees as the real Sandler. (If that's true, and I have my feelings that it may be very close to the inner reality Sandler lives with, then he could be a pretty disturbed guy.)
Thanks for the thoughtful response - I had never thought to look at films from the perspective you offered. It puts a whole different spin on things that removes a certain amount of the "magic" from the actors and puts it squarely on the directors. I'm sure this is something I instinctively knew but didn't necessarily pay attention to before. I will now. :-)
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Wow, how weird to basically agree and yet have such drastically different opinions. I agree that Sandler's best work is contained in The Wedding Singer and Punch Drunk Love, but I feel the character Sandler plays in The Wedding Singer is nothing more than a charicature. In Punch Drunk Love I see real angst, real torment in his character. This is a tortured man, and you're really not meant to laugh at him but maybe in sympathy with him. The Wedding Singer, to me, is just a silly character with whom we, the audience, identify with through his problems. I don't ever want to identify with Sandler in Punch Drunk Love, but I think it's a profound and amazing performance that I will return to again and again - where I've already grown tired of The Wedding Singer.