Reign Over Me: Not Quite

  • Posted by Dan Leo
  • October 17, 2007

Adam

Americans are an optimistic people. Most of us are descended from men and women who came over here because their lives in the old country sucked, and so they uprooted themselves and their families and left everything they knew to come to a country in which they hoped to have a better chance for happiness. And even now people are doing this. I work with a bunch of guys from Africa who came over here speaking little or no English — although most of them spoke a couple of African languages as well as French — they work their asses off and don’t complain and they send money back home.

The pursuit of happiness is ingrained in anyone who comes to America to live, and in anyone who was born here. And I think this might really be an American as opposed to a generally human trait. I think that in much of the world life is more about the avoidance of misery as opposed to the pursuit of something so lofty as happiness.

In America we believe that not only is happiness possible, but that it’s our right.

And thus we have Hollywood movies.

Presented for your consideration, a recent Hollywood movie, now just out on DVD: Reign Over Me, written and directed by Mike Binder, and starring Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle.

This movie manages to exemplify a lot of what is best and what’s worst about Hollywood movies.

On the one hand the movie attempts to deal with serious issues: devastating grief, mental illness, friendship and love.

It presents a middle-class black man and his family as human beings, as Americans with lives and problems just like those of any other middle-class family. And it presents a friendship between a black man and a white Jewish man as a friendship between two men, with no reference to their ethnicities or religions as immutably defining factors.

But on the other hand the movie suffers from the great failings of American “serious” pictures: sentimentality, artificiality, unreality.

It also tries to be a 9/11 movie.

What American wasn’t devastated by 9/11? As a country we had never had such a sudden, awful calamity, made all the more awful by its unfolding in real time on our television screens.

This was not the America we had grown up in, the America in which you were supposed to be okay all the time or there was something seriously wrong with you. In less than a half hour everything in our lives was decidedly not okay.

As a nation we went slightly insane, and this insanity is currently playing itself out, seemingly indefinitely, in some middle-Eastern country that six years ago very few of us could have pointed out on a map.

We were supposed to be happy, this was our right, our birthright, and now we were unhappy.

We were finally becoming a little bit like the old countries we had left behind, but only a little bit.

Because, after we got over the shock, we still wanted to feel okay.

Is there any more American phrase than, “Are you okay?”

It’s a phrase that actually appears in Reign Over Me.

Are you okay?

If you really want to disturb a fellow American, simply say “No” the next time someone asks you that simple question.

There is nothing more abhorrent to the average American that the idea of not being okay.

In Reign Over Me Adam Sandler plays Charlie Fineman, a man who is not okay, and with good reason. His wife and three daughters were killed in one of the 9/11 airliners.

It’s now several years later and this former dentist has become what we call a basket case. He rides around Manhattan on a motorized scooter, has no friends, doesn’t work (and doesn’t have to, the death of his family has left him rich in money if nothing else), he collects vinyl records, plays drums in a hardcore band, and then he goes home and plays computer games when he’s not obsessively remodeling his kitchen.

One day his old dental-school roommate Alan Johnson, played by Don Cheadle, sees him scootering by. Alan calls out to him, but Charlie’s wearing thick headphones, in his own iPodded classic-rock world, and he zooms off into the traffic.

We see a bit of Alan’s world. He’s got an apparently very lucrative dental practice judging from his Woody Allenesque Manhattan apartment, and he also has two lovely and apparently well-adjusted daughters; but Alan and his wife Janeane (Jada Pinkett Smith) have modest communication problems, and there’s a crazy woman, Donna (Saffron Burrows) who comes for a tooth veneer but really wants to give him a blowjob; when Alan sends her packing she makes trouble for him at his office. But his basic problem seems to be that in some way he’s not living life with gusto. Join the club, Alan.

Because this is a movie, and especially because it’s a Hollywood movie, Alan sees Charlie on the street again and forces him to talk to him. At first Charlie doesn’t even remember who Alan is, but, because it’s a Hollywood movie, Alan is persistent, and gradually he breaks through the thick layers of psychic protection Charlie has built up around himself.

Alan tries to help Charlie. Alan may not be entirely okay with his life but Charlie is obviously and utterly not okay. Conveniently, Alan shares an office building with a very attractive mental therapist, Angela (Liv Tyler). You know from the word go that Charlie will wind up consulting with Angela, and that’s what happens.

More plot also happens. Charlie is a tough nut to crack, and he does something really crazy that could well get him committed to a mental hospital for at least a year. The subplot with the loony woman who wants to give Alan a blowjob does not disappear, and you know that there has to be a payoff there, and there is.

In the end, because this is a Hollywood movie, an American movie, Charlie is on the road to recovery. The nutty woman, unlike nutty people in the real world, becomes not nutty and altruistic, and she conveniently transfers her affection from Alan to Charlie. Alan learns a lot from the whole deal and manages to work things out a little better with his wife.

Things are going to be a little more okay now.

But the problem is that while this movie wants to be about loss and about the importance of friendship and love, what it’s really about is making us, the audience, feel okay. It’s in the great tradition of “feeling okay at the end” movies. Good Will Hunting driving off to a new life after a bracing final session with his good shrink Robin Williams. All The Big Chill gang realizing at the end of the movie that friendship and love are what it’s really all about. Jennifer Lopez at the end of Enough kicking the living shit out of her bastard husband and starting a new life.

Reign Over Me is about the Hollywood ending.

Mike Binder says he was inspired by the tragedy of 9/11 to make this movie, and I don’t doubt he was sincere in his efforts to dramatize the effects of that day on one man. This movie is a 9/11 movie in that its anti-hero’s family died on that awful day, but would his story be much different if his family had died in an automobile crash? Would his grief then have been any less? No. But by making him a 9/11 victim the film-makers automatically make him more sympathetic. A very basic manipulation of the audience is built into the plot. And the first great 9/11 drama has not yet been made.

I’ve become boring on the subject of a brief time, roughly from the mid-sixties to the late seventies, when Americans could make serious movies, like Hud, like The Panic in Needle Park, like Five Easy Pieces, without the need for contrived plots and Hollywood endings.

We still make good comedy movies here (although not as good on the whole as out best comic TV shows), and we still make cracking thrillers for the big screen.

There has been some excellent drama on American TV the past ten years, primarily on cable.

We make loads of enjoyable straight-to-video crap, and we make some cop shows that very satisfactorily fill up an hour after a hard day.

But only very rarely does a good serious dramatic feature film get made.

I’m afraid that Reign Over Me is not one of them.

(This has been a Newcritics exclusive, approved by the Department of Homeland Insecurity. Turn to my place for more frivolous fare.)

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Viewing 17 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    Good write up, hater. What you've written is the reason I haven't watched this movie. And I'm normally like a magnet to tragic movies -- but, don't worry! Even though I'm compelled for some reason to watch tragic things -- I'm okay!

    How was Adam Sandler in it? I always assume Don Cheadle's gonna be good in whatever movie he's in, but I could see what I thought to be Sandler's attempt at serious acting in the previews. And that's the main reason it really doesn't really interest me to see this movie.

    I'm not just a (mediocre) comedian, I'm also a (mediocre) serious actor!
    • ^
    • v
    I'm a sucker for a good tragedy also, Blue, so don't feel bad. Believe it or not, even with my misgivings about this movie, I still choked up at the appropriate moments. It pushes all the right three-hanky buttons.

    And -- I know this is going to be a real Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not statement for me -- Sandler's performance was not one of the reasons for my misgivings about the movie. Don Cheadle was predictably fine, but Sandler's performance was fine with me also. As so often is the case with Hollywood dramas, the problem was the script. I'm constantly amazed at the low quality of feature screenplays, that nowhere along the way the stars or producers didn't just say, "No, this is not good enough. We need to rewrite this."
    • ^
    • v
    Is the constitutional Pursuit of Happiness still recognized? I'm not being coy here, I'm honestly not sure. Freedom of Religion is certainly nothing like the ideal from history lessons. But there again, I probably misunderstood: For years I imagined the phrase was: Freedom from Religion.
    But then, in the movies, anyway, if Liv Tyler's your therapist, perhaps any- and everything really is still possible.
    • ^
    • v
    To answer your question, Kathleen, actually the entire constitution has now been subsumed by the Patriot Act, and if you're against the Patriot Act then you're obviously not a patriot.

    If Liv Tyler were my therapist I'd probably be sitting there inventing problems for myself just to keep the therapy going.
    • ^
    • v
    I'm tempted to ask "are you okay, Dan?"

    But on a more serious note, what did you think of Syriana? Or Traffic? I think those were great "serious" movies without contrived endings.

    Exceptions that prove the rule, perhaps.
    • ^
    • v
    What? Don't I sound okay? Omigod,I'd better make an appointment with Dr. Liv Tyler!

    Ahem...y'know, it's funny, Manny, when I wrote the piece I was trying to think of the last American dramatic movie I'd seen which I liked without reservations and I drew a blank; but it was late and I figured there must have been some good recent ones.

    You're right, "Traffik" and "Syriana" were serious works done seriously, but they were also somewhat, um, didactic. And they were both of that sort of movie which is popular now among the moviemakers who attempt seriousness, the multiple-storyline movie, which is fine, but which can lend itself to a certain shallowness of treatment because each storyline is only getting 20 or 30 minutes of story-telling time; and then there's that sometimes awful lurching when the plotlines are supposed to merge. Movies of this sort that did not impress me so much were the recent "Crash" and "Babel"(which was made by a Mexican, but I mention it as an example of this sort of portmanteau movie).

    "Good Night and Good Luck" was another well-meaning movie that suffered a little from its good intentions I think, and from its multiple storyline approach.

    Clint Eastwood was really trying to make serious films about war with his last two pictures about Iwo Jima, and I think he did a pretty noble job with "Letters From Iwo Jima". But if you look at "Fires on the Plain" or "The Burmese Harp" both directed by Kon Ichikawa, and both of which deal with similar themes to "Letters", there is a big difference somehow in the level of artistry -- unless I'm just showing a stupid preference for foreign and older films.

    The Montgomery Clift blogathon that's going on -- please check The Self Styled Siren's beautiful contribution at
    http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com/2007/10/on-...
    -- got me to thinking of some of the good old Hollywood "serious" movies, especially one of my all-time favorites, "From Here to Eternity". This movie was well burdened by the Code and Hollywood conventions, but I can still watch it and still be moved and even awed each time I see it.

    What would "Reign Over Me" have been like if the young Montgomery Clift had been around to play Charlie, or if Fred Zinneman had directed it? For one thing, from what I know about Clift and Zinnemanm they wouldn't even have made the movie until the script was up to their standards, even if that meant Clift scrapping scenes and reworking them himself the night before shooting.

    When it comes down to it, in order to make a movie that is a work of art, you need real artists to make them. And nowadays I think it's very hard for a real artist to make a serious movie in Hollywood. I'm not talking about actors or cinematographers or musicians, all of whom are artists, and all of whom have to take the best work they can find. I'm talking about the artists who can write or direct good movies.
    • ^
    • v
    I see your point, though when I walked out of "Syriana" I felt it was the best movie I had seen in years. Looking back, maybe it did veer into didactic-land.

    I had thought of "Good Night and Good Luck" too, but had the same reaction as you--the story was drowned in its serious intentions.

    I have now spent ten minutes trying to think of one, so maybe you're right. But speaking of "Here to Eternity", Kathleen and I have it on our Netflix queue--I'll move it up.
    • ^
    • v
    I'd like to give "Syriana" another shot. I didn't catch it at the theatre, and when I finally watched it on DVD, it was very late at night, and I remember having a little trouble just following what the hell was going on, which might well have been the result of the late hour.

    I would love it if more reviewers would say, "I had a stomach ache when I saw that movie." Or, "Yeah, I was stoned, maybe it wasn't that good."
    • ^
    • v
    Do you get the feeling Americans are more inclined to self-pity? Three thousand dead on 9-11? Get the fuck over it.

    I know it was traumatic, but the Hollywood effect is the most salient aspect of this trauma. Compound this with leadership that can't focus on the problem and you have our present clusterfuck nation.

    My thought is very few Americans have the ability to focus and put things in perspective. In WWII Germany was losing over 10x this amount of people a week for 3 years! Russia? Multiply by a hundred.

    We have over two million people imprisoned in this country, 30,000 people a year being murdered by hand-guns, and another 9-11 is the big "existential" threat?
    • ^
    • v
    Ed, I would never question the grief of anyone who lost someone on 9/11, but it is true that Americans whine a lot nowadays.

    Of course old-school Americans weren't whiners. People who came through the Depression and WWII didn't want to hear that crap. I wish my father, who lost his leg at the Battle of the Bulge (over 19,000 Americans killed) were around today. I would love to hear him let loose on the current variety of hysterical war-mongering chicken hawk.
    • ^
    • v
    Okay Dan,
    I slept on it, and I suddenly remembered Sean Penn.

    "Dead Man Walking"? Pretty damn serious, and an excellent movie. "Mystic River"--same thing. I haven't seen "Into the Wild" yet but it sounds good.

    Maybe "Reign Over Me" would have been better if they had casted Sean Penn instead of the ridiculous Adam Sandler. Penn seems like someone with balls, and talent, enough to force changes in a silly script.
    • ^
    • v
    Manny, I'm still thinking about the 1950s and what was going on in American acting in that decade. Marlon Brando, Monty Clift, James Dean. And even older actors like Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda who did some amazing work in that decade, while you still had Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, James Cagney, Clark Gable doing what they did. Karl Malden and Anthony Perkins. Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, William Holden...and these are just some of the male actors! You also had Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Susan Hayward, Deborah Kerr, Eva Marie Saint, Julie Harris, Joanne Woodward, Liz Taylor, on and on...

    You didn't have this kind of wealth of acting talent in movies again until the early 70s, when all of a sudden you had the young Dustin Hoffman, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Robert Redford, Robert Duvall..all of whom are still with us, but, uh, like Edmond O'Brien says at the end of "The Wild Bunch": "It ain't like the old days." His next line was, "But it'll do." Let's hope some new talented younger artists can break through. I just saw "Alpha Dog", and it had a young actor I'd never noticed before named Ben Foster, I thought he was terrific.
    • ^
    • v
    Maybe “Reign Over Me” would have been better if they had casted Sean Penn instead of the ridiculous Adam Sandler. Penn seems like someone with balls, and talent, enough to force changes in a silly script.

    Sean Penn is my new crush. And I don't mean silly, giggly school girl crush either.

    I mean serious, let's go out to a dark bar, order some drinks and sit and discuss life -- crush.

    Dan, you could come and read a line of Proust if you want. And then we could discuss that, too.
    • ^
    • v
    Sean Penn not only has loads of talent, but he does seem like a guy you could actually sit down in a dark bar and have a few drinks with.

    My one big regret with Penn's career is that, excepting his guest spots on "Friends", he hasn't done another great comic turn like his breakout role as Spicoli in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High". He was so classic in that. Sean just nailed that one to the wall.
    • ^
    • v
    I have a colleague from the U.K., and when I answer a phone call from here the first thing she says is: "Are you O.K.?"
    It confused me at first, because in the States it is a question, and in her case, at least on the phone it is a standard greeting.
    We as U.S. citizens are demonstrably not O.K. Those of us who are old enough to remember the Vietnam War are re-living the nightmares of our youth, inculcating the feelings of helplessness that gave birth to American nihilism and the "Me" generation.
    Oops, sorry, I know, it's a movie review. I haven't seen the movie. I Think Don Cheadle is brilliant, and that is the only reason why I would watch it.
    By the way, the bluebird of happiness will do a no no on your negligee, every time. It has something to do with the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate.
    • ^
    • v
    I'm not sure who's weirder nowadays, we Americans or the British.

    I've noticed that Brits instead of saying "Hi" when they see you say "All right?" with what seems like only the subtlest hint of a question mark. I leave that one to the professionals to study.

    I don't know what they're so neurotic about; after all, they're the only state in the USA that has national health care...
    • ^
    • v
    he hasn’t done another great comic turn like his breakout role as Spicoli in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”.

    Well, we'll have to discuss that too. We'll put it on the agenda!

    He does seem too serious lately for me to picture him in a comedy. Yet, not serious enough where I think he's taking himself too seriously.

    That's what I think.

    Seriously.
 

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