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.
Nobody was better at this kind of material than Harold Lloyd, TCM's star of the month this April. (The last night of Lloyd movies is tomorrow, Sunday the 27th, starting at 8:00 pm.) Lloyd's heyday was in the 1920s, during the silent era, when American audiences could identify unselfconsciously with his boyish slapstick heroes. Several of Lloyd's features are about a young man who has to assert himself physically in order to win the girl, including Grandma's Boy (1922; showing on TCM at 12:30 am), and the best of them, Why Worry? (1923), The Freshman (1925), and The Kid Brother (1927). What works so wonderfully for Lloyd is that he can cut the pathos inherent in this kind of story by the ingenuity of the slapstick staging. People remember the stunts, not the moments when Lloyd's eyes fill up, though he performs them quite well. And when he plays an oblivious rich boy, as in Why Worry? and For Heaven's Sake (1926), he bypasses pathos altogether. When the hero of Why Worry? sees the villain ravishing the girl next door, and his pal, a giant, tears the entire balcony he's standing on off the facade and carries it to the other building so Harold can cream the guy, nothing gets in the way of the joke.
Anger Management also employs the storyline of the intruder who makes the meek, repressed hero's life better precisely by turning it upside down. Probably the best example of this in American movies is Bringing Up Baby (1938), starring Cary Grant as the paleontologist and Katharine Hepburn as the ditzy heiress whose dog steals the bone he needs to complete his dinosaur skeleton. It's also the storyline of The Cable Guy (1996) starring Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick, and while I prefer it in its romantic comedy form, because it supplies a natural avenue for the inevitable reconciliation of the stars, it can be unnerving for popular audiences when a woman invades a man's space as Hepburn does. Anger Management is technically both male-female and male-male versions at once, but the male-male version predominates, and the risk with that is that every outrageous thing the intruder does has to be over-the-top hilarious or the movie stalls.
Article comments
1 - Tom Johnson
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.
2 - Alan Dale
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.
3 - Tom Johnson
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. :-)