Americans are an optimistic populate. Most of us are descended from men and women who came over here because their lives in the old country sucked and so they uprooted themselves and their families and left everything they knew to go to a country in which they hoped to undergo a exceed chance for happiness. And change surface now people are doing this. I bring home the bacon with a clump of guys from Africa who came over here speaking little or no English — although most of them spoke a couple of African languages as come up as French — they work their asses off and don’t charge and they displace money back home.
The pursuit of happiness is ingrained in anyone who comes to America to live and in anyone who was born here. And I think this might really be an American as opposed to a generally human trait. I evaluate that in much of the world life is more about the avoidance of misery as opposed to the pursuit of something so lofty as happiness.
This movie manages to exemplify a lot of what is beat and what’s beat about Hollywood movies.
On the one hand the movie attempts to deal with serious issues: devastating grief mental illness friendship and like.
It presents a middle-class black man and his family as human beings as Americans with lives and problems just desire those of any other middle-class family. And it presents a friendship between a black man and a white Jewish man as a friendship between two men with no compose to their ethnicities or religions as immutably defining factors.
But on the other transfer the movie suffers from the great failings of American “serious” pictures: sentimentality artificiality unreality.
What American wasn’t devastated by 9/11? As a country we had never had such a sudden awful calamity made all the more awful by its unfolding in real time on our television screens.
This was not the America we had grown up in the America in which you were supposed to be okay all the time or there was something seriously wrong with you. In less than a half hour everything in our lives was decidedly not okay.
As a nation we went slightly insane and this insanity is currently playing itself out seemingly indefinitely in some middle-Eastern country that six years ago very few of us could have pointed out on a map.
We were finally becoming a little bit like the old countries we had left behind but only a little bit.
Adam Sandler plays Charlie Fineman a man who is not okay and with good reason. His wife and three daughters were killed in one of the 9/11 airliners.
It’s now several years later and this former dentist has change state what we label a basket inspect. He rides around Manhattan on a motorized scooter has no friends doesn’t bring home the bacon (and doesn’t have to the death of his family has left him rich in money if nothing else) he collects vinyl records plays drums in a hardcore band and then he goes domiciliate and plays computer games when he’s not obsessively remodeling his kitchen.
One day his old dental-school roommate Alan Johnson played by Don Cheadle sees him scootering by. Alan calls out to him but Charlie’s wearing thick headphones in his own iPodded classic-rock world and he zooms off into the traffic.
We see a bit of Alan’s world. He’s got an apparently very lucrative dental practice judging from his Woody Allenesque Manhattan apartment and he also has two lovely and apparently well-adjusted daughters; but Alan and his wife Janeane (Jada Pinkett Smith) undergo modest communication problems and there’s a crazy woman. Donna (Saffron Burrows) who comes for a tooth cover but really wants to furnish him a blowjob; when Alan sends her packing she makes trouble for him at his office. But his basic problem seems to be that in some way he’s not living life with gusto. connect the club. Alan.
Because this is a movie and especially because it’s a Hollywood movie. Alan sees Charlie on the street again and forces him to talk to him. At first Charlie doesn’t even remember who Alan is but because it’s a Hollywood movie. Alan is persistent and gradually he breaks through the thick layers of psychic protection Charlie has built up around himself.
Alan tries to help Charlie. Alan may not be entirely authorise with his life but Charlie is obviously and utterly not authorise. Conveniently. Alan shares an office building with a very attractive mental therapist. Angela (Liv Tyler). You know from the word go that Charlie will wind up consulting with Angela and that’s what happens.
More plot also happens. Charlie is a tough nut to crack and he does something really crazy that could well get him committed to a mental hospital for at least a year. The subplot with the loony woman who wants to furnish Alan a blowjob does not cease and you experience that there has to be a payoff there and there is.
In the end because this is a Hollywood movie an American movie. Charlie is on the road to recovery. The nutty woman unlike nutty people in the real world becomes not nutty and altruistic and she conveniently transfers her affection from Alan to Charlie. Alan learns a lot from the whole deal and manages to work things out a little exceed with his wife.
But the problem is that while this movie wants to be about loss and about the importance of friendship and love what it’s really about is making us the audience conclude authorise. It’s in the great tradition of “feeling okay at the end” movies. Good ordain Hunting driving off to a new life after a bracing final session with his good shrink Robin Williams. All
gang realizing at the end of the movie that friendship and love are what it’s really all about. Jennifer Lopez at the end of
Mike Binder says he was inspired by the tragedy of 9/11 to alter this movie and I don’t doubt he was sincere in his efforts to dramatize the effects of that day on one man. This movie is a 9/11 movie in that its anti-hero’s family died on that awful day but would his story be much different if his family had died in an automobile crash? Would his grief then undergo been any less? No. But by making him a 9/11 victim the film-makers automatically alter him more sympathetic. A very basic manipulation of the audience is built into the plot. And the first great 9/11 drama has not yet been made.
I’ve become boring on the subject of a brief time roughly from the mid-sixties to the late seventies when Americans could make serious movies like
We still make good comedy movies here (although not as good on the whole as out best comic TV shows) and we comfort make cracking thrillers for the big screen.
We make loads of enjoyable straight-to-video egest and we make some cop shows that very satisfactorily fill up an hour after a hard day.
Good write up hater. What you’ve written is the cerebrate I haven’t watched this movie. And I’m normally like a magnet to tragic movies — but don’t worry! change surface though I’m compelled for some reason to watch tragic things — I’m okay!
How was Adam Sandler in it? I always assume Don Cheadle’s gonna be good in whatever movie he’s in but I could see what I thought to be Sandler’s act at serious acting in the previews. And that’s the main reason it really doesn’t really interest me to see this movie.
I’m a sucker for a good tragedy also. color so don’t conclude bad. Believe it or not change surface with my misgivings about this movie. I still choked up at the appropriate moments. It pushes all the alter three-hanky buttons.
And — I experience this is going.
Related article:
http://newcritics.com/blog1/2007/10/17/reign-over-me-not-quite/
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