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In life, growth is inevitable. The seasons change, the trees lose their leaves, we put away childish things. But just because all of that is true of life, does that mean we absolutely have to see such a dispiriting pattern played out in the movies as well? In other words, just because we grew up doesn't mean Adam Sandler had to.
We signed on for Adam Sandler: Likable Moron. That's the Adam Sandler presented to us back during his days on Saturday Night Live, making up annoyingly catchy songs about Thanksgiving, pretending to sing opera, coming into a sketch restaurant in a Speedo to offer fresh-ground pepper. This Sandler had a damn pickle for a hand! Now give him some candy!
That's the Adam Sandler that went on to play other morons of varying degrees of likability in completely hilarious and awesome movies (shut up, they are!) like Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. This Sandler had a clearly defined place in the pop-culture landscape: his job was to play essentially the same character in really stupid, really funny comedies. That's it. We didn't have to learn anything from his films. We didn't want to learn anything from them. And even if we did -- come on, we weren't stupid! We knew the only lessons one could maybe, kind of extract from them were that it's nice to take care of your grandma, or you should stay in school -- nothing more complex than one might glean from a particularly didactic episode of The Smurfs. And Sandler's movies, though extremely cartoonish, were more entertaining because, swearing.
'Round about The Wedding Singer, we started looking at Sandler with a little suspicion. Robbie, his character in that movie, was barely an idiot at all. Virtually none of the movie's humour derived from Robbie's poor choices or possibly worrisome drunkenness; instead, the script relied on making '80s references, and...that's it. If you don't think Dallas and DeLoreans are funny in and of themselves, there's not much there for you. It almost seemed like it was less important, in this case, for Sandler to be a moron, and more important for him to be likable -- likable enough to be a credible leading man. And it's not as though Madison and Gilmore didn't also have romantic components, but they were incidental; we didn't know much about the female love interests, nor did we care. But as soon as Drew Barrymore comes on the scene, suddenly her character has to have, like, a backstory, and three dimensions. Three boring dimensions.
(All of which, by the way, were dressed and coiffed totally anachronistically. I mean, everyone in that stupid movie committed to looking ridiculous per the '80s setting except Princess Daisy, with her bob and her combat boots. There was no grunge in the '80s, bitch, and I don't care that she didn't realize it because she spent that decade totally shitfaced; someone should have taken her out back and given her a mullet, because if there has to be photographic evidence that I had one, she should not be spared.)
Turns out that The Wedding Singer was the beginning of Sandler's efforts to bring us on board with a new persona. Call it Adam Sandler: Romcom Goof. Sandler would still play mostly fuckups, of course: some would be even bigger imbeciles than Billy or Happy (see: The Waterboy, Little Nicky), but the new Sandler couldn't even distinguish his characters from the romcom morass by being enjoyably dumb; instead, their mental challenges extended only as far as their ability to be in relationships with women, and the point of the movies in the new era was to teach Sandler's characters how to be regular, generic romcom boyfriends. In Big Daddy, he does so through fatherhood. In 50 First Dates, he has to treat each day with his head-injured girlfriend as if they've never met. In Mr. Deeds, he inherits a lot of money and makes a muckraking reporter posing as his girlfriend to like him for real, or something. In Anger Management, he...manages his anger. The stories, and the women, are interchangeable; the movies never quite jell, they're filled out with idiot friends of Sandler's who can't act, and the ratio of funny to touching is way, way out of whack. They're too girly to be guy movies, and too frattily stupid to be chick movies. And yet, they do well, apparently, because each one does well enough to get the next one made, each film a stone on the path to Sandler's complete and irreversible comic emasculation. Or, in other words, to the doorstep of one Mr. Tim Allen.
There was also a Phase 2.5, running concurrently along the Romcom Goofs. I think of it as Adam Sandler: Serious Comic Actor. (Or, even more chillingly, Adam Sandler: Robin Williams.) This worked well for Sandler in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, and poorly in James L. Brooks's Spanglish, possibly because Anderson is a talented writer and director and Brooks is barely an upmarket Garry Marshall. It is clear that in working with name directors, Sandler was trying to see if he could be taken seriously playing characters who may not have spent their childhoods eating lead paint.
With this week's misbegotten remake of The Longest Yard, Sandler takes on yet another persona. This one's something along the lines of Adam Sandler: Cocky Prick. The character of Paul "Wrecking" Crewe -- a pro football player who goes to prison on drunk-driving charges, if the trailer can be trusted -- is both less likable and less moronic than Sandler's most beloved characters; he comes off as a crabby, world-weary bitch, and honestly, few people are usually psyched to find themselves in the pen, but the rich, entitled asshole who has to re-learn his own humanity is a role for Denis Leary or Will Smith or, for a retro feel, Chevy Chase. When an Adam Sandler character goes to jail, he should be comically terrified, desperately doing everything he can to ingratiate himself to everyone so that he doesn't get shivved. The Adam Sandler character can't be cool; he's not good-looking enough for us to buy that. He's a weird, dorky, off-putting man-child. He can't be a prison bad-ass; it would be hard enough for us just to buy him as a smoker.
Over the years, someone has been telling Adam Sandler that he needs to put away such childish things as punching giant penguins, debating whether shampoo or conditioner is better, and pissing his pants. Presumably the idea is for him to leave behind his juvenile fans and attract a new audience of moviegoers who think it's funnier to watch an infant drink liquor (as occurs in the #1 comedy of all time) than it is for a high-school dropout to punch Bob Barker in the face.
But Sandler has been wrong to lose touch with the boneheads and boobs who made him famous in the first place. Bill Pullman does fine playing forgettable romcom male leads. Jim Carrey has mawkish Oscar-begging down to a science. We need someone to make dumb comedies that both smart and dumb people can enjoy. And if Adam Sandler would quit trying to get more famous by making middle-of-the-road airplane movies instead of spectacularly wrong failures that turn into beloved cult hits on DVD -- if he could get busted down to where he could make more Billy Madisons and more Happy Gilmores -- we'd all be better off.
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