Adam Sandler adopts a shaggy Bob Dylanish hairdo to help him out with his most atypical and dramatic attempt at acting yet in Mike Binder’s ‘Reign Over Me’, a hit-and-miss melodrama that does some heavy lifting with its indirect dealings with 9/11 and its repercussions.
Mike Binder, fresh from his relative success with ‘The Upside of Anger’ which gave Kevin Costner his most affable performance in years and struck a mostly effective tone of comedy and drama returns to the same well here. This time, however, he takes it up a notch by taking on heavier themes – the emotional scarring that a lot of people still have out there from 9/11.
The film focuses around two intensely drawn characters who meet at just the right time in their lives to possibly divert the disasters that may been in their future otherwise. We first meet up with Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle), a successful Manhattan dentist, complete with a gorgeous wife (Jada Pinkett Smith), children and a mordant receptionist (Paula Newsome). In the small details, we see his restlessness and suffocation with life - his wife, although loving, is exacting and doesn’t allow personal freedom and he’s also being used as a floormat by his business partners in a practice he started.
So a fortuitous meeting with an old college roommate couldn’t have come at a better time – someone with a lot more problems than he. Alan spies Charlie Fineman (Sandler) scooting around the streets of an eerily empty New York with a look of aimlessness. Alan heard that Charlie lost his wife and three daughters on one of the doomed flights of 9/11 but never had the courage to look up his fellow dental school grad that he hadn’t seen since college.
When he’s not traversing the streets of NYC on his motor scooter while blasting rock tunes through his iPod to further remove himself from the streets, he’s in a perpetual state of refurbishing his kitchen (an everlasting promise to his wife), banging on his drums or lost in the world of the videogame ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ where he could defeat some foes that he never could in life.
The second chance meeting leads Alan to be drawn into this cut-off life. Cutting off all correspondence with everybody including his in-laws who still wish to be part of his life and seem offended by his insistence to not remember, Charlie sees Alan as somebody he can just hang out with and not have to worry about the discussion of family since Alan never knew them – and Alan feeds off the freedom of being able to get out of the home at night where he can use the excuse that Charlie needs help.
This rapport, of course, cannot last in its current state and Alan soon becomes aware that Charlie might seriously need some help as anytime Alan brings up Charlie’s family, he flies into a fit of rage. Resisting all former attempts to receive therapy, Alan is finally able to coax him into seeing a quiet, young therapist (Liv Tyler) who might hold the key but only after things hit an all-time low and a suicidal encounter with some cops leads to a court case that might get him committed.
While the first half of the pic does contain some laughs and subtle humor rather frequently, the last half of the pic is decidedly not funny. The resonance of the emotion underscoring every scene builds and builds to the final cathartic moment where we finally see a break through in Charlie where he goes into detail about his family. The suddenness of this moment leads to a great moment where Alan, the therapist and indeed the audience is afraid to breathe as to not pull Charlie out of the moment.
The cast is uniformly great with Sandler’s most effective thesping to date. His performance in ‘Punch-drunk Love’ was a variation of his yelling man-child comedic roles, and ‘Spanglish’ never really gave him the opportunity but he proves quite effective here, particularly playing off the equally well-cast Cheadle who has the difficult role of portraying a trapped, desperate man without any noticeable outward signs.
The film could use some trims, some streamlining as certain scenes drag without offering much new and the ending is a little too pat for a film that seemed to thrive on spontaneity up to that point but minor quibbles aside, I think Binder made the exact film he wanted to make on an emotionally reverberating whole.
The film is presented in 2.40:1 widescreen and is enhanced for widescreen televisions. Meager special features include ‘Behind the Reign”, a standard making-of, ‘Extended Jam Session with Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle’ which is...yep, you guessed it, a jam session with Sandler and Cheadle and finally a Photo montage.
A more than competent dramedy with both Cheadle and Sandler doing great work along with fine supporting turns from Pinkett Smith, Donald Sutherland, Liv Tyler and Saffron Burrows among others. The script very rarely dips into manipulation or flag-waving, surprising considering its subtle dealings with 9/11, so despite a few flaws, ‘Reign Over Me’ comes recommended. Just don’t expect a broad Adam Sandler comedy.
Reign Over Me is now available at Amazon and AmazonUK . Visit the DVD database for more information.
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