Running time: 124 minutes
Starring: Adam Sandler, Don Cheadle, Liv Tyler, Saffron Burrows, Jada Pinkett Smith, Donald Sutherland
Rating 4 out of 10
It's hard to know quite what to make of the confused Reign Over Me. It's a film with an identity crisis. One second it wants to be a serious, heartfelt drama, the next an absurdist comedy. The result is it succeeds at neither, leaving you to wonder what writer and director Mike Binder was striving for. The contrasting tones are exemplified by the performance of Adam Sandler, who shifts between the stupid schtick of his Waterboy days and his more subdued Punch Drunk Love approach. I have never been on the same wavelength as Mike Binder. Other than the passable The Upside Of Anger, his work has left me nonplussed. It's an opinion Reign Over Me only reinforces. There are moments that draw you in, willing you to enjoy it, with both Sandler and Cheadle being eminently watchable, but just as hopes rise, they are as quickly dashed by some drastic shift in tone, throwing things off kilter once again.
Though based in Manhattan, events take place in some warped reality. It looks like the everyday world, but none of the characters behave in anything resembling a normal manner. Either Binder inhabits some parallel universe where everybody is strange or it's a world he longs for and has to content himself with making films about it. Whatever the answer, it makes it hard to relate to anything in Reign Over Me.
Sandler plays Charlie Fineman, a dentist whose wife and three kids died aboard a plane involved in the 9/11 attacks. The loss caused Fineman to have a breakdown from which he hasn't recovered when he bumps into his old college roommate, Alan Johnson. Johnson is now a successful dentist with a wife and two kids, though his apparent perfect life belies the fact he needs "air." The two old friends have little in common. Fineman spends his days playing video games, constantly redecorating his kitchen and traveling around on a motorized scooter, while Johnson's life is micromanaged by his wife (Jada Pinkett Smith). They share little other than a past and loneliness, which is what draws them together, despite Fineman's erratic and violent outbursts.
It's a nucleus that harbors potential, but there are too many irrational elements and unanswered questions. Why is 9/11 involved? Fineman's family could just have easily died in a car crash for all the relevance the attacks have to the film. It seems a manipulative device to imbue the film with a significance it doesn't warrant. Why does Johnson find himself the sexual obsession of a beautiful, but barmy patient (Saffron Burrows)? It's a subplot created to solicit laughs rather than make sense.
