This, what you might call a
farcical romp, relies on a rather tawdry script, but is most interesting for
its actors’ adding some life to their characters.
David Buznik is played by Adam Sandler, playing against type as a mousy sort who needs to align his aggressive
side more with the rest of him, to be appropriate assertive and self-defensive.
The movie starts, in rather doltishly trite fashion, with an episode from
Brooklyn in 1978 when David Buznik was a boy, and at a street party—helpful
cultural references include that kids have CHiPS
and Dukes of Hazzard T-shirts, while
the Blondie song “Heart of Glass” and then a Bee Gees song play on the
soundtrack. A boyhood bete noir, Arnie Shankman, yanks down Dave’s drawers
while Dave is about to have his first kiss with a girl who is the apple of his
eye. The embarrassment, including exposure of his body part that someone
compares to a cocktail frank, is what we are led to assume causes his
diffidence as an adult.
In the modern day, Dave is
heading off on an airline flight, seen off by his girlfriend, played by Marisa Tomei, while Dave is shy about kissing her as a shadowy figure sits in
the terminal. Later, we see Dave happen to sit next to a rather scruffy sort
(who, if we’ve seen the film more than once, bears resemblance to the scruffy
shadow in the airport terminal), and the scruffy sort seems at first rather
gruff…yet starts laughing uproariously at an in-flight movie. Dave tries to get
headphones to watch the film too, and has trouble with the flight attendant.
Comic hi-jinks ensue. Dave winds up in court for assault, and is assigned by
the judge to an anger management class.
The class, held at a church,
turns out to be led by none other than the scruffy sort Dave sat next to on the
plane. He is Dr. Buddy Rydell, played by Jack Nicholson, in one of his
last comic roles (with JN having lain a little low over the past decade, after
a remarkable three-decade run, starting with Five
Easy Pieces [1970] and including three Oscar wins in different decades, two for Best Actor and
one for Best Supporting Actor). Dave thinks he can get a quick signature on his
court form and get out of the class. But Buddy has him sit in on a rap session,
which is one of this film’s few well-turned scenes, even down to editing and
getting a lot out of the actors (within the film’s standards, with its broad
and sometimes crass humor). John Turturro, especially, is amusing as
Chuck, an ice cream truck driver who had served in the military in the ~1983 Grenada
invasion, who has florid anger issues.
Characters’ humorously getting too familiar; later, the movie wilts
Buddy ends up doubling Dave’s
time in anger management, after some cleverly wrought plot twists in the
rap-session scene. Thus begins the nightmare of Dave being snared in an
anger-management regimen that seems increasingly like overkill, and having
Buddy specially assigned (in another court appearance) to Dave in an intensive
one-on-one fashion, with Buddy so intrusive (though he alleges this move is for therapeutic reasons) that he even shares the same bed
with Dave. (Buddy notes that in Europe, it’s
not uncommon for a number of men to share the same bed. Dave says, “That’s why
I’m proud to be an American.”)
After Buddy has been insinuated
into Dave’s life, the situations and vignettes usually don’t have the
creativity or originality of the big rap-session scene, and the film is at its
worst when, in a second stage of Buddy’s therapy for Dave, Buddy has Dave confront
his boyhood nemesis Arnie Shankman, who now lives as a Buddhist monk in a sort
of monastery. The scene plays like some kind of sitcom juvenilia, and even if
other scenes in the film stand multiple watches, this one turns rather painful
to watch again after the first viewing.
I won’t reveal much more of the
plot—if you’re interested, and this film can be fun for those wanting to see
therapeutic morés and assumptions lampooned in a sort of sympathetic way. See
it and judge for yourself. As I said, the writing tends to be rather sitcom-ish
(Dave’s boss is Mr. Frank Head, and you guess how much a crude double entendre
is meant here), but many of the performances are what makes the film
interesting—though many shots show a rather clumsy way of focusing on
individual actors, as if good takes, regardless of carelessness about
camera-movement niceties, were sifted out of a slew of dailies that were filmed
in a willy-nilly rush.
A slew of familiar faces turn up
The film features several actors
who were notable in other films, and a number of cameos, including by Woody
Harrelson (playing a secret-side cross-dresser who both works as a sports
stadium security guard and a moonlighting streetwalker, whose name for this
purpose is Galaxia and who has a Germanic accent), basketball coach Bobby Knight, tennis
star John McEnroe, and even Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. With broad comedy and such
appearances, the film was something of a crowd-pleaser to pick up spirits in
the shadowed year-plus following 9/11, but today it looks more like
“yesterday’s picnic,” to use a fine phrase I heard from some astute Texan, I
think it was, speaking on TV.
