How would Big Daddy cope with 9/11? Badly, writes Donald Clarke
WHAT - apart from the usual - can be done with Adam Sandler? Some years back, Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch Drunk Lovesuggested that, if set loose in the real world, Sandler's patented angry simpleton might strike a genuinely sinister aspect. Reign Over Me, a curious, anaesthetised drama, posits the theory that the symptoms of Sandlerism - vacancy, irascibility - might mirror the behaviour of someone suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. It's an interesting notion.
Mike Binder, a director whose films have hitherto struggled to make it across the Atlantic, has set the stakes precariously high here. Sandler's Charlie Fineman, once a dentist, now a virtual hermit, has lost his wife and two daughters in the attacks of September 11th.
Sending forward the star of Little Nicky as a proxy for those bereaved during those atrocities risks causing some serious offence. But, to be fair, the blankness of the actor's persona does quite effectively suggest the psychic annihilation that might result from such a tragedy.
Reign Over Me, elegantly shot on cool digital video, suffers, however, from some fundamental problems at a structural level. The story's trigger should be the point at which Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle), Charlie's college roommate, spots his old friend trundling through Manhattan on a tiny motorised scooter. Sure enough, Alan, who is beginning to feel trapped by marriage and middle age, tracks down Charlie and makes it his business to drag him back into the world of the living.
The picture does then happen upon a series of interesting oppositions, but it never quite develops anything you'd call a plot. Alan has everything, but is not entirely happy. Charlie has lost all that matters, but has dug a tiny hole in which he can just about survive. Alan likes soul music. Charlie listens to dull album-oriented rock from the 1970s. By the film's close, the dynamics of both men's lives have barely altered.
Binder may, of course, argue that few people, after passing a certain age, manage to radically alter their circumstances. Fair enough, but stasis doesn't make for good drama.
