WHO KNOWS IF IT was the end of the war, or the arrival of the first bona fide “hot” movie of the spring — either way, the US box office finally came into bloom. It took the combination of Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson and a very high concept to do it, but, financially anyway,
Anger Management is a record-breaking smash. The rage comedy opened with an estimated $47 million, a career best for both Sandler and Nicholson and a record for an April release.
Among the also-rans, lack of word-of-mouth cast its chill on the undistinguished programmers. Vin Diesel’s generic muscle romp A Man Apart plummeted by 64 per cent and Phone Booth turned out to be a short-lived gimmick, dropping by 51 per cent. The writer of Phone Booth, Larry Cohen, had touted the seal of approval Alfred Hitchcock gave to the project back in the 1970s; Hitchcock relished the formal and technical challenge of setting a film in an even more confined space than a lifeboat or an apartment. But Cohen’s eventual solution of a crazed sniper to keep the caller in the booth doesn’t seem to have achieved the same resonance as witnessing a possible murder from your rear window.
One used to wish that the people who made the trailers could also make the film. Now one wishes that the people who did the poster could make the film. The billboards for Anger Management have Sandler and Nicholson screaming at each other, nose to nose, with taglines like “Feel the love” and “Let the healing begin”. Sandler is the man sentenced by a court to get treatment or face jail and Nicholson is his overwhelmingly invasive therapist. It is a rich, ironic version of the dependable situation of two characters forced together — the therapist’s eccentric methods only make the patient more irate. But the film itself is a three-legged chair of a comedy that fails to fully plunder its premise.
It is not without a few chuckles. Sandler has reassembled his stock company of funny looking character actors, such as Luis Guzman and John Turturro, to play his “Fury Fighters” anger group. He has also hung onto the laidback, sadsack mode that worked so well for him in Punch-Drunk Love. The whiny little guy schtick he used to milk for instant pity has been scrapped. Now he is merely the soft spoken little guy.
As for Nicholson, he is back doing his leering Witches of Eastwick devil routine. The purring voice, the capering menace, the eyebrows flapping like wings. It is still fun, the meal he can make of words like “piquant” or “fracas”.
But the character dynamic is so ill-designed, a set of increasingly contrived situations and put-ons are needed to pump life into the last third of the story. The put-ons get easier and easier to spot, especially the last big one.
On top of that there is even a final twist that is a cheesy variation on The Game, the thriller in which Michael Douglas discovered everything he’d been through was an elaborate set-up designed by those who loved him to help him get in touch with his feelings. This kind of twist is always a terrible way to end a story because rather than deepening what has gone before, as with The Sixth Sense’s final revelation, it merely negates it. The audience can’t help but feel cheated as the emotions and dangers they’ve undergone by proxy are now rendered artificial, false. The ending of The Usual Suspects is a borderline exception to this, because one isn’t sure how much is real and not real in Kevin Spacey’s ingenious confession, so it forces one to go back over the story and assess it anew.
When the revelation is simply that the whole scheme was a put-on, one sees either a grand plan that would have been impossible to guarantee (The Game relies on Michael Douglas being able to escape from a submerged car and a buried coffin), or a finale tacked on to excuse a ton of plot holes. Would a judge really collude in a therapist’s scheme, trying an unwitting man three times for “staged” assaults in a real court?
The second assault charge hinges on Sandler accidentally hitting a waitress on the nose.
But, as the minister says to the priest in A Clockwork Orange: Padre, these are subtleties. The real annoyance in Anger Management is the central pair’s dynamic.
Sandler plays a pet clothes designer who is too shy to kiss his girlfriend (Marisa Tomei) in public. If he has any anger it is buried very deeply. Nicholson’s (hidden) task is to draw out that anger, which is strange, as his group work is geared towards calming down rage-aholics. Anyway, initially he just treats Sandler as if he really is angry, invading his life, his flat, his workplace. For half the movie it is the same beat being repeated — Crazy Jack driving Shy Adam more and more mad.
Sandler finally finds a way to fight back by tape-recording his mentor’s crazy methods (he makes him sit with a transvestite prostitute — don’t ask), but this lasts all of three minutes and the previous one-way character traffic quickly resumes. The result is therefore episodic, which is the succinct way of saying story repetition without character growth. Even when the incidents get more elaborate, the story still feels slow because the characters aren’t evolving or revealing new sides. External tricks have to be brought in to give the illusion of story progress, such as a change of location or more characters. In this case, the pair take a trip to Boston on a random pretext (Nicholson’s mother takes ill), only to head off to face Sandler’s childhood nemesis, a bully who’s now a Buddhist monk. Why couldn’t the pair have set off to meet the bully in the first place? That at least would have been a germane reason for a road trip to keep things from stagnating. Then again stagnation could be avoided if the hero had been given sufficient resources.
In previous films, Sandler’s shy persona was always given the boost of a terrible temper. He was the mouse that roared, the worm that turned.
Here he is the mouse who doesn’t roar for far too long. Shorn of his characteristic fits of fighting rage, he is bizarrely not given any other form of compensation either. No cunning, no cleverness, no wily schemes to playact and outwit his mentor in a game of cat and mouse. This is not Sleuth so much as The Karate Kid-lite. Even Helen Keller gave her teacher more of a run for money than Sandler does here.
- Anger Management is released in the UK on June 6
