Finally, Anger Management just doesn't feel as if it had been made by comedians--people who understand crazy. (And the big climax at Yankee Stadium with New-York-celebrity cameos is executed as blandly as it is conceived.) It's the kind of movie you laugh at because you can't get your money back and don't want it to have been a total waste. Just playing a regular guy Adam Sandler has the kind of ease in front of a camera that Jim Carrey would sell his soul to attain. But it won't do Sandler any good if he doesn't figure out how to pick scripts better than this.
You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.
Alan Dale is author of Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.
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. :-)