YOU DON'T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN
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Adam Sandler began his career as the most foolish of performers, and he was duly embraced by the most foolish of audiences: thirteen-year-old boys. This match made in adolescent heaven turned him into a powerful force in Hollywood and allowed him to make both more serious movies (Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish, Rein Over Me) and more ambitiously inane ones. Compare the early Sandler hit, Happy Gilmore, a farce about a hapless hockey player turned golf pro, with the more recent I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, a farce about gay marriage. There is an evolution here – the former is meaningless inanity; the latter, inanity with a message.

With his recent You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, the evolution is complete, as Sandler has extended his adolescent sensibility to that most intractable of subjects: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, producing something so silly as to be possibly useful. After all, serious negotiation has not done much to resolve this conflict. Maybe now is the time for absurdist stereotype with large doses of toilet humour – a kind of Borscht Brechtian approach to the peace process.

The premiss of Sandler’s film, which he co-wrote with veterans in this sort of thing, Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow, is that Sandler is Zohan Dvir, an Israeli counter-terrorist agent of mythic proportions (eg, he catches bullets in his teeth and grenades in his buttocks). He must spend his days in pursuit of his arch-nemesis, the Palestinian super-terrorist “The Phantom” (John Turturro in a head scarf). What Zohan really wants, however, is to leave the “hate” behind and go to America to pursue his dream of becoming a hairdresser. His mother urges him to be patient: “We’ve been fighting for 2,000 years, so it should be over soon”.

Sandler’s Zohan does make his way to America where he finds employment in a beauty parlour owned by a fetching Palestinian immigrant (Emmanuelle Chriqui). Love ensues, though not before hostilities are triggered between Israeli electronics store employees and Palestinian newsstand workers (the stereotypical jobs of these two groups in lower Manhattan). Behind the hostilities is a Donald Trump-like mogul who wants to take over the neighbourhood for real estate development.

Along the way, the movie engages in the expected crudely sexual hijinks. In one episode Sandler’s Zohan is able to save the ailing hair salon by not only cutting the hair but also servicing the sexual needs of its elderly patrons. The sequence is so good-natured in its tastelessness that one is tempted to compare Sandler’s character less to Warren Beatty’s in Shampoo (the obvious inspiration) than to that classic antecedent of good-natured libertinage, Tom Jones.

Equally entertaining are the farcical riffs on Israeli–Arab relations, including a thrashing out of differences on a Lower Manhattan street. Palestinian: “Everyone hates us. They think we’re terrorists”. Israeli: “People hate us, too”. Palestinian: “Why?”. Israeli: “They think we’re you”. From this exchange, the discussion digresses into the sexual allure of various female celebrities, including Hillary Clinton. The lesson is that, in New York, the similiarities between Palestinians and Israelis are far greater than the differences: they look the same, like the same food, share the same dreams of success, and suffer the same sort of thoughtless prejudice. It turns out that the Phantom really wants to come to New York, too, and open a shoe store. If America is the Promised Land, the small business is the Holy Grail, and corporate America, the dragon, which not only wants to destroy local merchants, but also, if one extrapolates, everything that isn’t in its image, thus creating the global mess we’re in. It’s a simplistic analysis, replete with its own kinds of prejudice, but it gives the film the humanizing uplift of a James Stewart movie. No coincidence, perhaps, that an earlier Sandler movie, Mr Deeds, was a remake of a Stewart classic.

Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss Zohan out of hand for reactionary nostalgia any more than for adolescent vulgarity. Although both are as pervasive as hummus (a substance that Zohan uses profligately for everything, including brushing his teeth), the movie also happens to be funny – an attribute distinct from its offences to taste and political correctness. Admittedly, it is not consistently funny, with too much belabouring of obvious gags, and with certain jokes likely to work better with some groups than with others (a knowledge of American Jewish ideas about Israel and a familiarity with the ethnic make-up of New York City may be helpful). But one would have to be a complete prig or an inflexible ideologue not to laugh at least a little.

Moreover, the film’s demographic reach is important. Not only will regular adolescent boys flock to it in droves, but other sorts of adolescent boys (ie, grown men) will go, too, and take their wives. As for the ethnic groups who are the subject of the movie, one wonders about their reactions. The potshots taken at these groups are not equal, insofar as Sandler plays an Israeli and clearly has had an American Zionist-leaning upbringing. But there is offence enough – and sympathy enough – for everyone. One would love to be able to see what joke or outrageous gag would get a smile from an Israeli or a Palestinian audience. If these groups could be made to laugh not just at each other but at themselves, then the film deserves an Academy Award, if not a Nobel Peace Prize.

Paula Marantz Cohen, Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University in Philadelphia, is the author of Alfred Hitchcock: The legacy of Victorianism, 1995, and Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth, 2001.

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