Adam Sandler is one of the craftiest crowd pleasers around. The belligerent and boorish aspects of his screen persona, which seem to irk a lot of people I respect, are deployed mostly to fake us out, to set us up for a benign sucker punch. Where some comedians develop a modulated slow-burn, Sandler's trademark is a startling fast burn, an emotional "instant on," a trick of flipping over from a sly smile to red-faced screaming anger in about a microsecond. His big hit last year, The Waterboy, was a single-minded showcase for this twitch, a celebration of road rage on the gridiron.
It should be obvious by now that the ferocity is a false front, a mask of toughness that the other characters in Sandler's films, and we in the audience, are expected to see through---only not too quickly. The crass behavior featured in the trailer and on the bladder-emptying billboard for Sandler's latest , Big Daddy, have been lifted out of context to reassure the groundlings that while he may have put aside childish things he hasn't become a wuss in the process. This is no small feat. As a theme for a modern major movie, in this epoch of perpetual adolescence, it's all but radical. The movie appears to be saying (it's always tricky trying to get serious about comedy) that if Adam Sandler can manage this delicate moral juggling act, then maybe we can, too.
The premise is, at best, prefabricated. A typical Sandler slacker gets stuck with, and to his own surprise "falls in love with" (to quote the film) a pugnacious waif of a five-year-old boy, the offspring of an absent roomate. And they are both predictably transformed by the experience. At least that's how it plays on paper. On screen, as it's been worked out from scene to scene, it's not as pat as it sounds.
The kid and the grown-up are both defined initially as loners, and as lonelier than they themselves realize. They both put a lot of effort into keeping up that false front. Sonny is a lapsed ex-law student whose college chums are leaving him behind, graduating to marriages and stressful careers,. He's still living in what looks like off-campus student housing, watching hockey games and eating pizzas, making ends meet working as a toll collector on the turnpike. The boy, Julian (played by identical twin brothers), is even more isolated, sent packing by his sick mother and stranded in the Big Apple, in movie terms the scariest of all cities. All Sonny wants, at first, is to get this frightened child to open up, and he doesn't much care how. He doesn't waste a lot of energy pondering the implications of the fun activities they pursue together. If tripping a Spandexed dork on rollerblades helps Julian forget himself, and even makes him laugh out loud, then so be it.
The values that are inculcated may be rudimentary but they are not entirely reprehensible. Sonny has a healthy sense of outrage at (mostly petty) injustice, and he adheres to a primitive code of retribution, which he passes on to Julian. What the Big Daddy billboard doesn't tell you is that this particular act of public urination is a form of street justice. When a snooty maitre de refuses to allow a visibly squirming Julian to use the restroom on the premises, Sonny decides it's only fitting to redecorate the restaurant's facade. Later on, though, when the kid blithely takes a whiz against the potted plants in a public school classroom, Sonny begins to rethink his parenting techniques. The sense we get, however, is that he is building upon his fundamentally decent instincts rather than setting them aside, learning, like Julian, to apply them to real life situations in a more sophisticated way. Sonny's initial approach to child care is just to mold Julian in own image, to create a kind of Mini Me. But when he sees himself reflected in this tiny mirror, he's appalled. Every parent I know has gone through a version of that sobering experience at some point.
The focus of the film is on Sonny's process of growth, not Julian's, and the groundwork that's laid for this is thorough, is not entirely persuasive. Sandler makes sure we understand that Sonny isn't just a failure, he's a dropout, a conscientious objector. He rolls his eyes when his lawyer-pals discuss the pointless cases they're working on. In one throw-away exchange he untangles a professional snarl for one of his friends by citing a technicality he seems to pull out of thin air. He does it from a prone position, barely furrowing his brow. The clear implication is that as a student Sonny was perhaps the smartest of them all, the one his go-getting buddies came to when they got stuck. He could have been a big success, bigger than any of them, but hey, buzz off, he just didn't feel like it. He alone sees how meaningless it all is, and they're just a bunch of gullible saps.
There's definitely an element of self-congratulation and perhaps even cowardice underlying the grunge/slacker figure that has become an icon of American pop culture. It is a lot easier to maintain a snide and superior attitude when you don't even attempt to accomplish anything, and don't risk failure. But it's probably lost cause applying real-world standards to a mythic personage. A lot of people are a lot like Sonny, or at least they think they are, and that's all the authenticity you need to craft a sturdy movie surrogate. As he is established in the early innings of Big Daddy, Sonny Koufax the archetypal layabout is just a jumping off point for the story, and what really matters is what he's jumping off to. It's not the starting point but the destination that is important. How do we get from where we are today, the state we're in now, to someplace different, and possibly even better?
The original comic-screamer, Sam Kinison, seemed to be trying obliterate himself as a human being in his moments of primal fury, as if his soul was being torn out by the roots. Sandler may be a screamer, too, at times, but his work is all about clinging to self-control, not losing it. In The Wedding Singer, he lampooned the kamikaze self-exposure of a lot of current pop music, grinding out a throat-peeling punk anthem: "Won't somebody please just kill me now!!" (Or words to that effect.) But if that sequence made us smile rather than cringe ---and even worked as a sweet courtship ploy in the context of the story--- this was mostly because it was executed knowingly---by Sandler but also by the character. It was staged as a piece of satire the character was directing at himself, making fun of his own romantic self-pity and in the process overcoming it. Like all of Sandler's eruptions, the song was an ironic reference to a scathing outburst rather than the real thing.
