Reign Over Me

Directed by Mike Binder

One of the finest American film debuts of the new century (and one of the least appreciated) is Dito Montiel’s A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints. Montiel turned a working-class memoir—an urban lament—into a poetic appreciation of the music, the almost-stifled feelings and near-tragedies of common life. All that is what’s missing from Adam Sandler’s respectful good try, Reign Over Me. Too bad Sandler didn’t get Montiel to key in on the goodwill and inchoate sense of personal triumph that has driven the comic past silly projects into sincere, courageous—sometimes brilliant—movies like Spanglish and Click.

Instead of Montiel, Sandler chose Mike Binder, the HBO hack who lacks the gift of sincerity and turns plausible human dilemmas into middle-brow schmaltz (though visually lush, courtesy of cinematographer Russ Alsobrook.). So many good opportunities are wasted in Reign Over Me, yet the film is admirable even while it fails. Montiel got close to what friendship, family and nostalgia are really like; Binder’s film suggests what we want life to be like. The difference is a matter of Adam Sandler’s ambition to be more than a goof, whether or not he gets the details of seriousness right.

Here he plays Charlie Fineman, a grownup young, white man who mourns his wife and children who died in the 9/11 attacks. Fineman’s depression is rescued by Alan Johnson, his old college roommate who is now a successful middle-class cosmetic dentist. Johnson is black (played with credible rectitude by Don Cheadle, who gently brings up The O’Jays whenever Fineman brings up Springsteen). Their friendship could launch another “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey” meditation on quasi-erotic race relations except the issue here is class. Moneyed advancement is what Fineman and Johnson have in common, but it doesn’t protect either man from feeling trapped—or from fate. The movie isn’t about 9/11; it evokes that ongoing moment which David Byrne on the album Grown Backwards significantly described as “the misdirected energy of a nation still reeling.” It’s about a modern male’s difficulty getting in sync with adulthood (and a world) that seems to have betrayed him.Reign Over Me inadvertently aces the prison of modern capitalism, perhaps because Binder doesn’t think that’s what he’s doing. But Sandler feels the pinch and he squirms beautifully, even when the farcical and sentimental movie itself drags on. Because Binder takes class for granted, he doesn’t connect desire and frustration as Montiel powerfully did. That’s why Sandler gainsays Fineman’s Jewishness while unmistakably resembling the tortured, secretive ’70s Bob Dylan—perhaps the ultimate icon of self-questioning privilege. This grumbled mumbling for love is almost solipsistic. Yet Sandler/Fineman’s abject misery avoids self-pity. Fineman can be inappropriately funny (he does a brilliant clarification of a ubiquitous sexist remark), then curl-up or lash-out in sorrow. Sandler distills how Fineman has lost security and confidence, not just love. His 9/11 realization, “I saw it, and I felt it at the same time,” is as remarkable as the mirror scene in Angel-A or Dito Montiel’s piercing adulthood sequences. Fineman retreats into boyhood (nestled in headphones), refusing to be domesticated. Sandler proves that “comedian” seriously means “actor” (in French). He shows his audience that they don’t have to keep chuckling mindlessly. Perhaps one day he’ll cinch the anxiety about class and desire he can’t articulate and meet Dito Montiel, who can.