There are a few small moments to treasure, but in the end the saddest thing about this film is how much acting talent was wasted.
By: Elise Nakhnikian
When United 93 and World Trade Center came out last year, I couldn’t relate to the debate about whether it was too early for a movie about Sept. 11. I could see how it might be too hard for people who had lost loved ones to watch a movie about it, but for the rest of us, surely a sensitive re-enactment could only help us understand what had happened and how it had changed us. But it’s never the right time for a meretricious melodrama like Reign Over Me, which uses the awful events of that day as an excuse for Adam Sandler to "stretch."
Writer/director/actor Mike Binder, a slightly shady-looking character who always casts himself in his own movies (he plays the business manager of Sandler’s Charlie Fineman in this one), is probably best known for The Upside of Anger. Like that movie, Reign Over Me often transcends its gimmicky plot through the sheer power of its acting, but it ultimately leaves you feeling hollow.
Both vehicles are yoked to an unlikely team: a thoroughbred (Joan Allen in Upside and Don Cheadle in Reign) paired with a show pony (Kevin Costner in Upside and Sandler in Reign). Binder coaxed a fine performance out of Costner, and he gets a few moments of greatness out of Sandler here. For the most part, though, the comedian-slash-actor relies on his usual idiot-child shtick.
Sandler’s usually open face is hidden behind a startlingly early-Dylanesque tumble of curls and a chunky set of headphones. The headphones serve two purposes: cutting Charlie off from the world he wants to tune out and delivering a steady stream of classic rock songs, some of which pepper the soundtrack and give the film its name. In short, Charlie looks and acts like a surly teenager, and he leads what appears to be a teenage boy’s ideal life. When he’s not gliding around the streets of New York on a motorized scooter or roaring at a Mel Brooks marathon, he’s playing video games on a giant-screen TV or jamming to his CDs in his spacious, barely furnished apartment. And a mysterious stash of cash enables him to live comfortably without ever working unless drumming with a punk band at Webster Hall counts as work.
But that cash, we eventually learn (the information is doled out teasingly, like the emotional porn it is), came from a settlement Charlie got after his wife and daughters were killed on one of the planes flown into the World Trade Center. And it is unslakeable grief, not adolescent hormones, that makes Charlie mutter, sulk, retreat from the world, and fly into violent rages although he has repressed his memory of the event so thoroughly that he himself may not know what he’s hiding from.
Well, OK. Grief can manifest itself in all kinds of ways, so let’s say it could make a devoted family man act like one of his own kids. But even if we buy the premise, we may not know where to go with it.
Well-meaning people including Alan (Cheadle), the old dental-school roommate who runs into Charlie on the street and befriends him anew keep trying to get Charlie to "open up," insisting that he acknowledge the cause of his pain so he can start to heal. At the same time, voice-of-reason-type characters keep saying this is the wrong approach. As the wise therapist played by Liv Tyler (yup, you read that right) puts it, in the (Lord help us) extended courtroom scene: "Charlie needs to find his own way, not on our time but on Charlie time." But emotional porn, like physical porn, has its rules, so Binder gives it to us both ways, giving Charlie an overwritten showcase of a speech about his loss that aims straight for our heartstrings.
Alan’s relationship with Charlie, which is the core of the story, feels murky too. The always marvelous Cheadle makes us feel the ennui and loneliness of a successful middle-aged man who seems to have everything a loving and beautiful wife (the perennially underutilized Jada Pinkett Smith), well-adjusted kids, a beautiful home, a successful dental practice but is feeling increasingly alienated from it all. Yet even Cheadle can’t quite sell Alan’s relationship with Charlie, a formula strictly out of the you’ve-helped-me-more-than-I-helped-you Hollywood rulebook. Why would a thoughtful adult like Alan pursue a wounded man-child like Charlie to begin with? Does he want to save an old friend? Does Charlie’s life look like the ultimate fantasy of freedom to a man going through midlife crisis until his friend’s utter lack of entanglements teaches Alan to appreciate what he has? Who knows? Who cares? I got too numbed out by the implausibility of the friendship, the often redundant scenes, and Charlie’s petulant self-involvement to buy any of the big themes.
Thanks to Cheadle and a few other fine actors in the cast, there are several small moments to treasure. When Charlie finally kisses his mother-in-law, who is played by the wonderful, slightly ditzy-seeming Melinda Dillon (she was Ralphie’s mother in A Christmas Story), she breaks out in hiccuping sobs more affecting than all of Charlie’s tantrums put together.
Scenes like that break through this movie’s slick surface to make you fleetingly feel something genuine. But in the end, the saddest thing about this movie is how much acting talent it wasted.
Rated R for language and some sexual references.

