Adam Sandler turns 42 next month. Is he finally growing up? Duh! He’s as juvenile as ever in You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, but at least his role as an Israeli commando turned hairstylist is a slight advance on all those wretched man-child characters he’s churned out so often.
What is it with all those arrested adolescents he so loves to play? In film after film, he’s clung to the safety blanket of his favoured role as a goofy grown-up who doesn’t appear to have left childhood – just look at his loutish ice hockey player cum golfer in Happy Gilmore or his spoiled 27-year-old rich-kid going back to school in Billy Madison, his layabout graduate living off the proceeds of a law suit in Big Daddy or Satan’s heavy-metal loving son in Little Nicky.
Sandler’s emotionally stunted characters have something else in common – a tendency to erupt suddenly into anti-social rage. Beneath their habitual passivity, there lurks a disturbing aggression, a pent-up hostility towards the adult world that explodes now and then in cruel practical jokes – such great wheezes as placing branches in the path of speeding skaters in Big Daddy.
One director has, though, shown that it’s possible to do something more than recycle the same witless pratfalls with Sandler’s trademark passive-aggressive losers. There Will Be Blood’s Paul Thomas Anderson cast Sandler as another introverted character in his wildly offbeat romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love, but he made him dig far deeper than his usual shtick to create a psychologically acute and strangely affecting performance.
But it seems audiences don’t like it when Sandler goes out of his comfort zone. Punch-Drunk Love only took $18million at the US box office, while James L Brooks’ Spanglish, which saw Sandler playing his most mature character to date, made back barely half of its $80million budget. By contrast, Sandler’s last movie, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, scooped almost $120million in the States.
The thoroughly objectionable Chuck & Larry has Sandler and Kevin James’s straight New York firefighters posing as a camp gay couple in order to pull off a pensions scam. The set-up allows Sandler and co to trot out a stream of offensive gay jokes, but they slip in a plea for tolerance at the end, as if that will make amends.
Zohan finds Sandler tackling an even more sensitive topic – relations between Israelis and Palestinians – and, once again, you have to wade through a morass of crude stereotypes before you reach the movie’s fuzzy why can’t we all get along message.
Meanwhile, Sandler’s contemporaries are eagerly embracing their inner man-child. Step Brothers, released later this month, finds Will Ferrell and John C Reilly playing a pair of middle-aged, overgrown boys who resort to pranks and name-calling when they are forced to live together as stepbrothers after their parents marry. Somehow, I don’t think Hollywood is in any hurry to grow up.
