Doing a nosedive
Mark Steyn
Anger Management 15, selected cinemas
-if, like the Adam Sandler production
you make a movie every week, the law of averages suggests that sooner or later you're bound to hit on a good idea. The idea Anger Management hits on works brilliantly in the trailer and almost as well in the actual film — the idea of a meek, mild-mannered airline passenger who, through the officiousness of the cabin crew and the twitchiness of post-9/11 security, finds himself in a situation that rapidly spirals out of control.
Before September 11th, American air travel was unpleasant enough: you're stuck way out at the end of the runway on some dingy commuter plane, air-traffic control has ground to a halt, the cabin's boiling hot, you ask the stewardess for a Diet Coke, and she slaps you down because it's in breach of some obscure Federal Aviation Administration regulation that says you can't serve cold beverages while the plane's on the ground if the temperature's over 88 degrees. On September 11th, the FAA's peculiarly coercive and un-American regulatory regime proved to be not just useless but a contributing factor in the appalling events of that morning. But that's no reason for the FAA not to introduce a whole raft of even more useless regulations — like you can't use the bathroom on any flight within half an hour of Reagan National Airport in Washington.
As that flight in Australia illustrated the other day, the reason it's a lot harder to hijack a plane these days is because the other passengers will beat the crap out of you. But the FAA's alleged 'homeland security' regulations continue to operate entirely independent of reason and reality: an elderly man 27 minutes from Reagan National absentmindedly uses the toilet and the plane is held for hours in an isolated corner of the air field until the FBI can secure the area and drag the old codger away in handcuffs. If he'd happened to be a foreigner — an Australian, say — he could have been held without trial indefinitely without the right to make a phone call and his family wouldn't have had a clue where he was or why.
So the opening scene of the trailer when Sandler's character, soft-spoken ad exec Dave Buznik, finds a simple misunderstanding over cabin service suddenly escalating is a moment of tremendous comic potential. In the film itself, it's not quite so full of potential, since we've already seen the incident that has led to Dave being so soft-spoken and, indeed, a milquetoast: during his first tongue sarnie, he had his pants yanked down and his shortcomings exposed to the neighbourhood. This traumatic episode has left him with a crippling shyness that makes him unable to neck in public with his girlfriend (Marisa Tomei). So we're in penis-joke territory, not social comedy or satire. Also, Adam Sandler as someone crippled with embarrassment is a daunting concept. And if the message of the film is that getting mad solves nothing, that would seem to fly in the face of the entire Sandler oeuvre. Nonetheless, at the climax of the airline scene this is still a potentially great comedy.
Then they go and throw it all away. The obnoxious loudmouth sitting next to Dave Buznik — indeed, the one who has pitched him into his predicament — is one Buddy Rydell. And, lo and behold, when Dave is hauled before a judge and order to undergo anger management training, his designated counsellor is the self-same Buddy. Dr Rydell is played by Jack Nicholson and the beret gives him a faint resemblance to late-period Orson Welles, which somehow underlines the fact that this is what happens when heavyweight talent goes slumming. If this film has a future, it's as a showbiz trivia question: in which picture does Jack Nicholson sing 'I Feel Pretty'? This scene, a duet with Sandier on a busy Williamsburg Bridge, sounds better than it plays. Maybe it's the choice of song, too obviously straining for comedic mismatch. The idea feels second-hand — the same song was used for similar effect in Analyze That, and it didn't work there either. Or maybe it's just that there's no real chemistry between Sandler and Nicholson. Sandler retreating into his underendowed schnook routine and Nicholson gleefully letting rip in full maniacal scenery chewing seem like two solo turns placed side by side. And any possibility they might get any kind of groove going is killed dead by an unending procession of vanity cameos, by Woody Harrelson and John McEnroe and Robert Merrill and Heather Graham. The moral of this picture is: don't get mad, get even more celebrity guest stars. By the time we get to Rudy Giuliani's energy-sapping appearance, Anger Management is notable mainly for its lack of management — there's no direction, no sense of how to use its resources, and no innovation, culminating in a Yankee Stadium finale relying on a gimmick that was clapped out before Sandler was born and is notable only for the fact that the line 'Give her a five-second Frencherr is delivered by Mayor
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