The overweening sentimentality of Adam Sandler’s latest hobbles its humor.
By: Bob Brown
Adam Sandler, heir to a Jerry Lewis brand of zany comedy, has turned to family values for his latest film. Actually, Sandler has been turning in this direction for some time, trying to escape the cruder image of Happy Gilmore and The Waterboy (directed, as this film was, by Frank Coraci). There were a couple of strange wrong turns along the way Little Nicky and Punch-Drunk Love are cases in point.
As Michael Newman, a rising architect in a high-powered New York City firm, Sandler plays an all-too-familiar character. He’s the epitome of a modern professional who is so eager to get ahead that he pushes his loved ones into the background. Deadlines looming at the office come before his son’s swim meet, the annual family camping trip and the needs of his wife, Donna (Kate Beckinsale).
What frustrates him to no end, however, are the myriad controllers for all the household’s gadgets. He can never get his hands on the one for the TV. Either he’s turning on an overhead fan or opening the garage door, or powering toys that smash into walls (slapstick is not forgotten). "Whatever happened to getting up and turning a knob?" he wonders.
Even the neighbors have a universal remote. In a fit, Newman stomps out late one night to find a store that sells universal controllers past a closed Best Buy, a closed Staples, and finally to an open Bed, Bath & Beyond. The film is a series of blatant product placements for everything from stores, to milk, to car stereos, even to junk food. "I don’t need a Twinkie… I do need a Yodel," Newman says, as he tries to distance himself from his favorite snack, which is ever-present throughout the film.
The unhappy office-family split in Newman’s life plods uncomfortably and unamusingly for the film’s first several minutes. You want to know what the point is. When do we get to the controller? Things liven considerably after Newman slumps on a bed in the store and is awakened by heavenly choirs. A light illuminates a door somewhere behind "Linens" marked "Beyond."
In the inner chambers of the store is a wild-haired tinkerer, Morty (Christopher Walken), who answers Newman’s request for a universal controller. It’s in a cavernous back storeroom. He’ll give it to Newman, because it’s not in the store’s database.
The rest of the film is about Newman’s discovery that the universal controller is literally that. He brings it back to Morty, who shrugs, "You wanted a universal remote control. That remote controls your universe." No returns allowed. And the controller becomes more independent as it learns Newman’s preferences and begins to act on its own to fast forward through certain routines or uncomfortable parts of his life.
Fast forward through foreplay, fast forward through extended family dinners with his parents (Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner), fast forward through anything that competes with his work time and his promotion. He aims to be named partner by his boss, Ammer (broadly played by David Hasselhoff).
As the plot thickens, its likeness to a Dickensian narrative is obvious. This is A Christmas Carol rewritten for modern times. In movie terms, it bears some likeness to It’s a Wonderful Life, or the more recent films Groundhog Day and Back to the Future (with the important difference that it is much less witty than either). Scriptwriters Steve Koren and Mark O’Keefe have taken their ideas from Bruce Almighty and re-applied them here.
But is it a comedy? The film’s overweening sentimentality hobbles its humor, which is delivered unevenly, in patches. There are sometimes funny visual gags, but too many are separated by stretches of plot development or flatness.
And for a film about family values, there are too many crude gags: horny dogs and a stuffed animal; flatulence (when all else fails, gas ’em); sexist humor. These remnants of the earlier Adam Sandler style sit uneasily with what becomes a soppy tear-jerker.
As Newman, Sandler shows his most serious and, dare one say it, dramatic potential mixed in with the silliness. The rest of the cast is fine, especially Christopher Walken, who brightens the screen whenever he pops up.
But there’s a serious message buried in the film about what our culture has become. As Ronald Dworkin points out in his new book, Artificial Happiness, drug companies and physicians now serve the public demand for pills to erase what Freud termed "ordinary unhappiness." Rather than experiencing life’s vicissitudes, we want passive gratification that numbs us to them. Like Newman, whose controller zips him through the boring and unpleasant parts of his life, we’re on auto-pilot. We’ve engineered the ability to click through so much of the bad or boring stuff. Would that it were possible with this movie.
Rated PG-13 for language, crude and sex-related humor, and some drug references.