In Defence Of Adam Sandler

I guess even the internet has a limit to its senseless mockery.

Over the past couple of weeks, following the release of his latest film Blended, opinion pieces have been popping up online calling for a re-thinking on a decade or so of Adam Sandler bashing. It’s a welcome change to those of us who’ve found something endearing and life-affirming in his much derided recent work (not to mention all those really good dick jokes), but unfortunately, most of these recent ‘pro-Sandler’ pieces have missed the mark.

Rethinking The Sandler Slander

Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri got the ball rolling with his piece, ‘Why Adam Sandler Might Be The Most Important Comedian Of His Generation’. Given the title, you might’ve expected a positive reappraisal of the humanistic, everyman schtick that’s been Sandler’s bread-and-butter since his Saturday Night Live days. Instead, Ebiri recast Sandler’s entire career as some kinda endless pity party, cloaked in ironic sentimentality. “None of it matters, Sandler secretly says to us,” wrote Ebiri. “Even if I’m telling you to be cool and stay in school, or to stop picking on losers, or to follow your dreams, or to always put family first, you know, in your heart of hearts, that I don’t mean it. Because everything sucks and the world is stupid.” It might be the most cynical reading of every heartwarming ending to every Adam Sandler film ever.

Although on a slightly more forgiving note, Jesse David Fox from the same publication continued the misguided thinking. “Blended is a bad movie. It’s a very bad, stupid, bad movie,” wrote Fox, in a piece titled ‘Why Bad Movies Can Be Good For Your Emotions’. “In spite of its awfulness, I found myself more emotionally invested in it than I had been with any movie in recent memory. Or, maybe not in spite of – maybe it was because of Blended’s badness. Its unbridled stupidity shut my brain down, allowing direct access to my heart,” he continued. It sounded a whole lot like the ridiculous blabbery of someone who won’t just admit to themselves that they liked an Adam Sandler movie.

And still. His movies remain box office hits (Grown Ups 2, his last film before Blended, earned almost $247 million at the box office worldwide, implying audiences connected with it despite poor word-of-mouth). Ask any one of your friends if they like Adam Sandler and they’ll undoubtedly quote something like “Shampoo is better!”, or say they enjoyed Happy Gilmore or The Wedding Singer, or cried at the end of 50 First Dates. (Ignore the ones who name-drop his “more serious” roles in Punch-Drunk Love or Funny People – those are not ‘Adam Sandler movies’, and those people are wankers.)

So why then is Sandler still an annual Razzie regular? Why is he not getting the respect he deserves?

Adam Sandler, Auteur

You may remember a dramatic segment at the 2012 Oscars, when a montage of talking heads started enthusiastically discussing their fave things about movies in the way your mum and dad might talk about their romantic road-trip to wine country.

Amid nutty mutterings from Robert Downey Jr and Werner Herzog, the segment cut to a hunched over Adam Sandler. “I’m eventually trying to, one day, tell the truth,” he said. “I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‘Alright, that about sums it up.'”

Needless to say, the segment provided prime fodder for a critical community who can’t (or, more likely won’t, as Fox’s article shows) see through the goofy high concepts, PC-baiting jokes and sentimentality to his films’ deeper messages and humanist streak.

While the PG-rating makes it light on his usual shit-stirring tendencies, Sandler’s latest flick Blended is another example of his personal preoccupations. In a Brady Bunch-esque set-up, Sandler plays Jim Friedman, a widower who’s struggling to relate to his three young daughters — particularly the eldest Hilary (he calls her ‘Lary’ and dresses her in chinos and polos), who’s starting to discover her blossoming teenage femininity, and the middle child Espn, who looks perennially anxious and has regular conversations with her deceased mother. On the other side of the equation is Drew Barrymore as Lauren Reynolds, a divorced mother with two sons, the eldest of whom is just reaching his sexual awakening (ie: the pubescent jack-off phase).

Over a fortuitous trip to some African tourist wonderland (I imagine it’s what The Lion King: The Musical looks like), the two come together, sharing life lessons, recognising each other’s hypocrisies, and helping each other. Heartless jerks may get thrown off by the sentimentality, but it’s genuinely touching in the way both parents act selflessly for the others’ kids, like when Lauren brings over a buffet dinner plate for the middle girl’s dead mother, rather than rolling her eyes and calling her crazy. What kind of monster would scoff at such a sign of compassion and empathy?

With its focus on familial anxieties, Blended follows on from much of Sandler’s recent work. Perhaps his best of the last few years was Grown Ups, which navigated the disconnect between Sandler’s new world (the moneyed Hollywood set) and the world he grew up in, and, more specifically, the world he’d like his kids to grow up in. This is a world not beholden to soulless gadgetry, one where kids are free to fuck up and make mistakes (a theme he then continued with Andy Samberg in That’s My Boy); a world that’s open to the uplifting possibilities of the outdoors, friendship and fun. It might be nostalgic, but it’s also deeply personal – a word that’s not often associated with Sandler.

Like many of Sandler’s leading men, Grown Ups’ Lenny Feder is an upwardly-mobile schlub, a slovenly self-made success, an extraordinary outsider who finds himself in a world of odd privilege (see also: Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, Mr Deeds). His kids are spoilt and snobby, rude to the help and so disconnected from the real world they don’t know how to throw a rock in a pond. In the film’s opening scenes, Sandler uses his signature annoyed temper and resigned sighs to demonstrate the upwardly-mobile parent’s biggest fear: fuck, my kid’s a brat.

The film is filled with nostalgia for a simpler time (‘70s and ‘80s power-pop anthems and ballads evoke the connection to Sandler’s working-class suburban youth), but it’s essentially less about adults acting like goofs and trying to recapture their youth (as many supposed), and more about adults trying to teach their children how to be kids. It’s basically the mature antithesis of Judd Apatow’s oeuvre of obnoxious man-children, but one gets mocked mercilessly while the other gets perennially praised. Sigh. I don’t understand the world.

Despite the current muted attempts at re-thinking Sandler’s work, the wider backlash seems to continue. A glimpse at Sandler’s most recent IMDB message boards reveal posts like “Why do all of his recent movies suck?” and “Proof that Adam Sandler’s movie career is CRAP!” (the proof is a bunch of Rotten Tomatoes ratings, geez). Arsehole critics continue to pretend that his movies aren’t anything besides wacky goofs, even though they reveal a personal vision and exhibit such heart and empathy as to spark a viewing response like the one described by Fox (“The most moving movie experience of my life…”, he wrote).

It seems about time that the world cut the guy some slack — he’s a fucking lovable genius in three-quarter jean-shorts.

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Blended is in cinemas now.

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Rob Moran is the former editor of Junkee. He has contributed to various publications including Daily Life, CLEO, Rolling Stone and Vice.