James does the previously unthinkable, as he defends the career of Adam Sandler with intelligent thought. Originally posted on June 12, 2012.<\/em><\/p>\n

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A little while ago, Alex and I were writing some hilaaaaaarious jokes for the intro to our Judd Apatow-approved video podcast<\/a>. As Alex (and large sections of the moviegoing public) is wont to do, he suggested one along the lines of \u201cThis episode is brought to you by Adam Sandler jokes. Remember? Those movies you liked when you were 7?\u201d This seems to be the general consensus on Adam Sandler, that he makes immature movies for either kids or immature adults. Actually, the more recent general consensus is that Sandler makes\u00a0bad<\/em>\u00a0immature movies for either kids or immature adults, but also made some at least decent movies many years ago. Film fans have a special attachment to the movies they watch a number of times when they\u2019re young, and will continue to like them more than their current tastes would normally dictate as a result. At a point, nostalgia, memories and familiarity bleed through our judgment and become more important than our current tastes when judging a movie. As much as I want to say that Happy Gilmore is a \u2018good\u2019 movie, all I can say with confidence is that I\u2019ve always enjoyed it, which sounds like the same thing, but is entirely different. I think a lot of people my age feel that way about that movie, that its quality does not come from its merits but from its place in their personal and emotional memories. For a number of reasons, this is the way I feel about Adam Sandler as a whole.<\/p>\n

Now, I understand what I\u2019m getting into here; defending Adam Sandler is an uphill battle. I get this. I saw Jack and Jill. (Okay, no I didn\u2019t. That movie looked like total shit.) And to be accurate, I\u2019m not really defending him in the sense that I\u2019m going to try explain to you that you\u2019re wrong if you think Jack & Jill is a bad movie. It probably is. That\u2019s not my point, however. I\u2019m not really defending him as a good actor, or an actor that makes good choices, or somebody who consistently writes funny movies. I\u2019m also not just going to say that we should forgive his poor films because he seems to be a pretty decent human being in real life. But there has to be something more to Sandler\u2019s films, something we simply haven\u2019t been looking at closely enough to see.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t recall the first time I saw Billy Madison, but I know I was pretty young; definitely well below whatever the ratings guide thought was appropriate. It was a movie I found very funny then, even though I knew I didn\u2019t understand all of the jokes. I wasn\u2019t sure why Billy thought it was so funny when the teacher asked the class to go to page 69, but I knew a lot of the other jokes made me laugh. Happy Gilmore followed, occupied a similar role in both film comedy and my heart. Those were probably two of the first movies that I quoted the way that I continue to quote movies that make me laugh. Sure, all genres have famous quotes, but it\u2019s the comedies that give us the lines that are most fun to say over and over to our friends. It\u2019s a shorthand that conveys a whole situation in just a few words, and is almost guaranteed to make your friend laugh. \u201cMrs Lippy\u2019s car\u2026 is green,\u201d is certainly not funny on its own, but to those who have seen Billy Madison, you\u2019ll probably get a laugh. It was a way to tell your friends that outside of this immediate situation, there is something we both find funny. Comedy is one of the most subjective things in the world, and to find someone with the same sense of humour is a powerful thing, particularly at a young age.<\/p>\n

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Another piece of media that tended to turn me into a walking Sandler quote machine was not a movie, but his 1993 comedy album They\u2019re All Going to Laugh at You. And considering that it went double platinum and was nominated for a Grammy, I guess I wasn\u2019t the only one. There was something even more free and whimsical about a comedy CD than there was in a ninety-minute movie. Things changed quickly. No characters were around for more than 5 minutes. Children have particularly wild imaginations, and this constant change of scenery, story and people throughout Sandler\u2019s comedy album continued to allow me to use mine to further enjoy the jokes about Fatty McGee.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m certain I couldn\u2019t appreciate it at the time, but themes of youth and growing up were major parts of both Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore, as well as the lesser-known Airheads, a movie that came out earlier but I didn\u2019t see until later. As the third lead in Airheads, Sandler is part of a band that takes a radio station hostage until the station agrees to play the band\/domestic terrorist faction\u2019s music. The band may be young and misunderstood by older men wearing suits, but they know their way of doing things is how they want to live forever, which is not an unfamiliar sentiment for young people. In Billy Madison, Sandler\u2019s titular character is a partyer without ambition who must go through school again to prove to his father that he can run the family business when his father dies, an oedipal exercise with comedic results. Happy Gilmore continues this trend to an extent, as it is about (a notably fatherless) Sandler as an aspiring hockey player who proves to be an incredible, slapshot-wielding professional golfer. As golf is traditionally a middle-aged or older man\u2019s sports, Gilmore must quell his youthful energy and temper to fit in and conquer the most conservative old man sport ever invented. It\u2019s easy to see how all these movies make nice little metaphors for the changes we\u2019re expected to make when growing up which are pretty universal, but the situation in Happy Gilmore may have some broad connections to Sandler\u2019s life personally.<\/p>\n

Sandler has discussed in interviews that his father had a pretty serious temper. If the amount of yelling we see his characters do is any indication, the younger Sandler may have had some of this passed down to him as well. Besides an explosive temper being central to Happy Gilmore, I don\u2019t think I need to explain the plot of his later movie Anger Management to show how it applies in that case. The Waterboy is a movie about channeling excessive amounts of anger (curiously fuelled by an overbearing parent) into something positive. Little Nicky, in a broad way, is similar to Billy Madison in that it\u2019s about taking over his father\u2019s business, but instead of running hotels, Sandler is about to run Hell because his father is Satan. Mr. Deeds is similarly about taking Sandler\u2019s character taking over a family company, this time from a deceased male relative. Most of his movies up until this point are about taking over for\/becoming your father in a general way, and sprinkled in are some more Sandler-specific issues of anger and temper control.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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The later part of Sandler\u2019s career, however, has a decidedly different set of struggles. Even if you think that the jokes in his films are not maturing, it must be noted that the subject matter that he\u2019s dealing with certainly is. He may continue to approach the themes in a juvenile way, and there are still too many dick, fart and poo jokes for you, but there has at least been a transition as Sandler has aged. His soon-to-be-released That\u2019s My Boy features Sandler what appears to basically be his character from Billy Madison, if Madison hadn\u2019t turned things around at the end of the movie (and didn\u2019t come from a rich family). Sandler\u2019s character still loves to party, but is now middle-aged and broke, and tracks down his son in order to borrow money to pay back the IRS. I haven\u2019t seen this movie yet, but I\u2019m going to guess that it\u2019s a father-son version of She\u2019s All That: at first Sandler fakes the relationship and growth for selfish reasons, but ends up feeling the way he sets out to pretend he\u2019s feeling leaving everybody better off in the end. The final message will be positive, but the source is likely a little darker: Sandler\u2019s fear of being a bad father. Of course this is exaggerated and no way a reflection of who he is, but functions of a fear of who he could be. Sandler\u2019s character will likely work towards a redemption the real Sandler hopes he never needs for his daughters.<\/p>\n

We see something similar in Grown Ups, Sandler\u2019s most financially successful movie to date and the only one of his films to spawn a sequel. The movie is about a middle-aged group of men whose high school basketball coach dies, leading them all to reunite in order to attend the funeral. But deeper down, the movie actually seems to be about Sandler\u2019s apprehensions about the job he\u2019s doing as a father. In the film, Sandler plays a successful\u00a0Hollywood\u00a0agent who has spoiled his kids, kids whose brattiness is painfully apparent when they deal with Sandler, his friends, and hometown citizens. This is something that is the other side of the parental fears of That\u2019s My Boy. Instead of doing nothing and providing nothing in that film, in Grown Ups, Sandler\u2019s character has given his kids everything and made them appreciate nothing, a fear I imagine to be potent among nice rich people with kids. Similarly, the entire plot of Click is set off by Sandler\u2019s role as an overworked parent who has no time to see his family, a blanket concern that is perhaps closest to Sandler\u2019s real life.<\/p>\n

There is one theme that is present throughout much of Sandler\u2019s career, both within the narrative of his films and how they are made and marketed: playing the role of an outcast of sorts. I have already discussed how Airheads, Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore show Sandler\u2019s respective characters struggling to gain acceptance into a certain world, often being pressured to change something about himself to do so. Happy Gilmore and The Waterboy both depict him as a constantly picked-on and desperately lonely person, with the exception of an elderly person and, eventually, the romantic attention of a female. Little Nicky, Punch Drunk Love, Eight Crazy Nights, Reign Over Me and Funny People all show his characters as entirely or almost entirely friendless, at least at the start of the film. Outside the narrative of his films, we can find a few possible causes for these feelings if they are rooted in reality. First is his Jewishness he clearly has no problem reminding us with, with hits like The Hanukah Song and frequent references to his heritage in interviews. Jewishness has been a particularly powerful source of isolation in American comedy for a long time. It has also been pointed out by many that contrary (for some reason) to most people\u2019s assumptions, Sandler appears to be politically conservative, having donated funds to Republican candidates which in\u00a0Boston\u00a0(where he grew up),\u00a0New York\u00a0or Los Angeles (where we\u2019ve known him to work) again puts you in the minority.<\/p>\n

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Sandler has found a great and frequently used solution to this problem of being on the outside: use your pull to surround yourself with friends. We constantly see Sandler on-screen with the same people.\u00a0David Spade, Kevin Nealon, Rob Schneider, Kevin James,\u00a0Steve Buscemi<\/a>,\u00a0Chris Rock<\/a>,\u00a0John Turturro<\/a>,\u00a0Jon Lovitz<\/a>,\u00a0Clint Howard<\/a>,\u00a0Norm Macdonald<\/a>,\u00a0Nick Swardson<\/a>\u00a0can all be seen in multiple Adam Sandler movies. It is not rare to see people who have achieved a certain level of status in Hollywood use this to work with actors they like to work with with but what is a bit exceptional is his working relationship with\u00a0Allen Covert<\/a>,\u00a0Peter Dante<\/a>, and\u00a0Jonathan Loughran<\/a>. These three were college friends of Sandler whose combined filmographies contain almost no credits in movies that Adam Sandler neither acts in or produces. These are just his group of friends that he gets work for. I\u2019m not saying Adam Sandler is some kind of loser who needs to hire his friends to work with him because no one else likes him, but everything I\u2019ve read or heard makes it seem like he is a well-liked man who is easy to get along with. He appears to be genuine, grounded, sweet and funny. What\u2019s interesting to me is the lengths he goes to not to be left out, while making movies that explore just that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Vulnerability is the root of all comedy and when we feel vulnerable, we feel like kids again. Sandler is someone I remember when I was a kid and I see his career as a showcase of how I felt when I was that age. And now I can see him dealing with problems of different ages but it all shows up to me through that lens, just as I said about movies you watch when you\u2019re young. He could make bad movies for the rest of his life, or great ones, but my sense of him will be the same. It\u2019s not about him or his work being good or bad. Too many things are wrapped up in it for those words to really apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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