The recent Netflix films, as a body of work, don’t represent
a radical departure for Sandler, though they do revolutionise
the viewing experience, making it possible to make regular
refrigerator beer runs, which is perhaps why I remember
practically nothing about The Ridiculous 6 (2015) other than
a recurring gag involving a burro with explosive diarrhoea. Along
with Murder Mystery and The Do-Over, it represents Sandler’s
Netflix forays into action comedy territory, with the last-named
the most interesting by virtue of its abiding tone of mournful
middle-aged male menopause, negotiated with the aid of
ancient friendships.
Sandler is an unapologetic sentimentalist, and the old-fashioned
loyalty central to his persona – to living friends, to the memory
of Farley, to an adolescent ideal of comedy and, more and more,
to the East Coast white ethnic world of his childhood – has
perhaps played no small part in adhering his audience to him.
This sentimentality extends often beyond people into a blind loyalty
to the stuff of the past, a nostalgia for the pop culture of youth,
which for the 53-year-old Sandler amounts to a fetishisation of
all things 1980s, a fetish that defines The Wedding Singer and
Pixels, receives an autocritique of sorts in That’s My Boy, and at
the absolute worst invites recurring punchline cameos for Vanilla
Ice in that film, The Ridiculous 6, and 2017’s Sandy Wexler. The
apotheosis of Sandler’s nostalgia kick, Sandy Wexler features one
of his more grating performances – this is saying something – an
affectionate burlesque of longtime talent manager Sandy Wernick
which incorporates a sticky-gummed, high-pitched delivery and a
barked laugh accompanied by performing seal applause. Sandler
is old enough now to have some of the patina of a nostalgia act
on himself, and so his ‘Grow Old with You’ can double nicely as
a guarantor to fans.
The identifiable outlier of the Netflix crop is The Meyerowitz Stories,
the only film in the bunch that might be found competing for the
Palme d’Or at Cannes, which in fact it did. Baumbach places arch-
failson Sandler in the centre of a dysfunctional family ensemble that
includes Ben Stiller and Elizabeth Marvel as his siblings and Dustin
Hoffman as the high-handed Meyerowitz patriarch, a curmudgeonly
sculptor whose 1960s reputation, never
enormous, has long since faded from memory.
There are custom-made opportunities for
Sandlerian ineptitude and rage – the film opens
with a harrowing scene of parallel parking a
Subaru Outback in downtown Manhattan – as
well as Sandler’s syrupy sweetness, duetting
on piano with daughter Grace Van Patten.
A sort of American rejoinder to the drama
of artistic inheritance presented in Oliver
Assayas’s 2008 film Summer Hours which
introduces the question of duty to a legacy
that might not be terribly important to begin
with, it’s as fine a film as Baumbach has
ever made – though not the best to come
out of the Netflix run.
That honour belongs to
The Week Of, the directorial debut of SNL writer’s
room veteran, Zohan and Hotel Transylvania co-writer, and voice of
Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, Robert Smigel. As in The Meyerowitz
Stories, The Week Of finds Sandler again in doting dad mode and is
likewise concerned explicitly with matters of taste, though Smigel’s
film introduces an additional dimension of class anxiety. Sandler
plays Kenny Lustig, a middle-class family man residing in the vinyl
siding districts of West Hempstead, Long Island, introduced frantically
planning the wedding of his eldest daughter, which he insists on paying
for, and declining offers of financial assistance from the father of the
groom, a wealthy surgeon played by Chris Rock. As catastrophe follows
catastrophe, the Lustig home fills to bursting with stranded guests,
and the manner in which Smigel introduces his sprawling ensemble
cast and delineates relationships among them is a marvel of comic
economy. Small-town American patriotic
parochialism gets a glorious send-
up in a subplot involving an ancient
double-amputee uncle played by Jim
Barone, mistaken for a war hero and
pelted with “Thank you for your service”
pieties, while the film builds towards an
affirmative explosion of human chaos. As
in Jack and Jill and That’s My Boy, rude,
raw blue-collar energy acts as a liberating
force, and The Week Of ends in a decisive
victory for the louche, the loud, and the
lowbrow. All of which is to say – to consider
only the prestige parts in Sandler’s career
is to misunderstand that career entirely029