Sandler’s specialisation
in rageaholic outbursts,
used to comic effect
in dorm room staples
Happy Gilmore (1996)
and The Waterboy
(1998), was put in the
service of a slightly
more serious minded
and certainly more
consciously stylised
film, directed by a fair-
haired boy of the critical
establishment. In the years
since, the Sandler auteur
film has become a semi-
regular tradition, forming a
roster that includes James L
Brooks’ Spanglish (2004), Judd Apatow’s Funny People (2009) and
Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected). (Mike
Binder’s Reign Over Me, Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children
and Tom McCarthy’s The Cobbler, belong in their own sub-category
- the failed Sandler auteur film.)
It’s on the basis of these various succès d'estime outings that
Sandler has earned a grudging highbrow esteem never afforded to
his Saturday Night Live alumni-turned-film star coevals like David
Spade and Rob Schneider, who Sandler continues to work alongside:
he co-stars with Spade in 2016’s action-comedy The Do-Over, and
mimes simultaneous oral sex on-stage with an astronaut-suited
Schneider in 2018 musical stand-up special Adam Sandler 100%
Fresh. Both titles were released via Netflix, part of a ballyhooed
deal struck in 2014 when Sandler cut ties with Sony Pictures,
his home for 15 years, whose studio lot still houses his Happy
Madison production company. This came in the midst of a
string of “underperforming” films (2011’s Jack and Jill, 2012’s
That’s My Boy, 2014’s Blended, 2015’s Pixels) that gave rise to
misgivings about Sandler’s continued viability as a leading man,
and growing tension, with Sony’s chief Amy Pascal, who was found
referring to Sandler as an “asshile [sic]” during the making of
Hotel Transylvania 2 in a hacked email.
And yet, today, still, as Sony founders, the Sandman abides. The ultra-
secretive nature of Netflix bookkeeping makes it difficult to judge the
popular success or failure of any given release, but it can be said that
few companies are in the habit of throwing good money after bad, and
in 2017 Sandler’s initial $39.5 million, four-movie deal with Netflix
was extended, with another four films put on order. Doubts concerning
Sandler’s longevity only a few years ago might be swept aside by a
viewing of the sublimely saccharine 100% Fresh, which features our
boy playing a reverb-drenched, weepy guitar solo through a tribute to
the late Chris Farley and performing a new rendition of ‘Grow Old With
You,’ the song which climaxes 1998’s The Wedding Singer. “Now when
I'm on a diet you take away my potatoes,” sings Sandler, “Say ‘Fuck
all those guys’ after reading Rotten Tomatoes.” The song is dedicated
to Sandler’s wife, but performed to his audience, who by sticking with
Sandler have signed a covenant with bad taste.
Eulogising John Wayne in the pages of The New Republic in 1979,
Andrew Sarris noted that, in spite of the string of masterpieces
in which he appeared – and his most ghastly missteps – Wayne’s
“Overall reputation with the public depended less on the classics
and the disasters than upon a steady stream of routine but robust
romances from the 1940s through the 1970s.” Along the same
lines, we might surmise that however much Sandler’s more wilfully
arty outings have done to stretch his abilities as a performer or to
improve his critical standing, his overall reputation with the public
is owed not to a Punch-Drunk Love or an Uncut Gems, but to the
scads of puerile, mawkish, grotesque and frequently very funny films
that he’s turned out since 1995’s Billy Madison. (There were film
appearances before this, but it was in Billy Madison that the Sandler
screen persona, as it would be revised, refined and played against
in the quarter century to come, was given its first full expression.)Take for example Sandler’s other 2019 release, the routine but
robust made-for-Netflix Murder Mystery, in which he plays a New York
cop visiting Italy with his wife (Jennifer Aniston), only to be embroiled
in an Agatha Christie-esque whodunnit plot. All of the hallmarks of
autopilot Sandler are here in evidence: There is the picturesque
location shoot, which seems to have been chosen as the pretext for
a family vacation – the most egregious instance of this being the two
impressively lax Grown Ups films, which amount to paid rusticating
holidays for Sandler, Spade, Schneider, Chris Rock and Kevin James.
There is the downbeat central performance by Sandler, shamefacedly
concealing his latest failure at his detective’s exam, self-consciously
joking about his double-chin, and generally playing up the part of
the middle-class, bridge-and-tunnel New Yorker
insecure amid cosmopolitan027