‘Anger Management’

Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson team up for a therapy-busting comedy that’s light on laughs but heavy on star cameos.   [PG-13]

By: Bob Brown
   Behavioral therapy is ripe for parody in the movies. Hollywood could have several field days with anger management by itself. There are dozens of anger-management ranches for teens (as if cow-punching will curb the urge toward people-punching), taped courses on taming the inner volcano, self-hypnosis, and realigning misaligned polarities with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TSM).
   We’ve seen Adam Sandler as an angry young man before in Punch Drunk Love. There, he’s healed (or heeled) by an empathetic woman played by Emily Watson. Anger Management is another movie about healer girlfriends and the power of true love. Here, he plays a mild-mannered, self-deprecating marketing guy, Dave Buznik, who designs fashions for fat cats (the feline type). His girlfriend, Linda (Marisa Tomei), is sunny but impatient while Dave dawdles about popping the question. She seems perfectly happy with Dave’s minuscule equipment, which was exposed in a traumatic childhood incident. (One vein of humor — albeit weak — is phallus size.)

"Adam
Don’t make Adam Sandler angry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. The same is true of Jack Nicholson (below).
"Jack


   Dave’s buttons get pushed when he’s seated next to an annoying passenger, Buddy Rydell (Jack Nicholson), on a business flight. Buznik, who just can’t seem to get a break, is railroaded into taking an anger-management class when he’s tagged as an unruly passenger. All he wanted was a set of headphones, and his meek request is treated as a federal case. A burly air marshal (Isaac C. Singleton Jr.) tazers him into unconsciousness and he winds up in court. The rest of the film follows his course of increasingly bizarre and anger-inducing therapy at the hands of his therapist, none other than his plane partner Rydell.
   As directed by Peter Segal, whose previous outing was Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, this therapy-bashing comedy is light on laughs but heavy on star cameos. Imagine a film where you get box-office draws, not only in the star roles, but also in every walk-on imaginable.
   In fact, there’s more fun watching stars pop up than there is in the uninspired first-time script by David Dorfman. Is that really Woody Harrelson in drag as a faux-German transsexual prostitute? What led Heather Graham to spend only a couple of minutes on-screen as a barfly? Can you believe John C. Reilly as a reformed bully who’s a Buddhist monk? Yes, that’s none other than Harry Dean Stanton, a great character actor, as a blind man in a bar brawl. If you’re a basketball fan, you’ll recognize Bobby Knight, but he’s not there for anger management. And on and on to a crescendo of surprising celebrities from the worlds of sports, opera and public service.
   While there are some laughs, the film goes wrong in a couple of ways. First, Adam Sandler plays against type. He is not a Woody Allen or a Buster Keaton, so having him appear as a meek, put-upon nebbish who just wants to get the girl is a stretch. He’s hardly given any comedic lines and few physical pratfalls. What made Sandler famous in the first place, his sort of post-modern surrealist deadpan humor, has been tamed down to a sentimental sweetness that serves the one-big-joke plot but does little to elicit belly-laughs along the way.
   Another problem is how to harness Jack Nicholson. He’s been hilarious, even subtle, in As Good As It Gets and About Schmidt. But this time he reverts to his earlier persona as all-wild-man, all the time, sans witty dialogue. Even the silliest lines or gags get the full wide-eye, wide-mouthed Nicholson treatment. And I have to add, he’s now carrying every boozy, drug-binged night he’s ever had on his rutted, bloated face. Maybe "as good as it gets" has got up and gone. His playing opposite Sandler just emphasizes how different are their comic approaches.
   A strange piece of recycled humor appears in this film, as if the filmmakers liked what they saw and wanted it to spice up their own tired production. "I Feel Pretty" from West Side Story serves as a disarming, happy-making ditty when sung by a grown man in the voice of a young woman. Robert De Niro made it memorable in Analyze That. This time it goes from the lips of Sandler and Nicholson to a climactic production number. It’s mildly amusing, but if you’ve seen the earlier film, it smacks of petty theft.
   There are bright spots. A couple of the better bit-players in the talented ensemble are John Turturro as Dave’s barely contained "anger partner," Chuck, from group therapy, and Luis Guzmán as Lou, a borderline homicidal gay Puerto Rican (talk about multilayered politically incorrect humor). Their scenes are good enough to stand out from the rest of the picture. Overall, though, this funny-machine runs out of steam about two-thirds of the way through, leaving viewers feeling the need for anger management of their own, what with the price of movie tickets these days.
Rated PG-13. Contains crude sexuality and profanity.