Adam Sandler is a vastly talented actor who is a victim of his own success, which generally keeps him working in a wan comedic mode with directors of little inspiration. The outstanding exception, to date, is his performance in Judd Apatow’s “Funny People,” which showed what happens when he works with directors who tap into the depth of his talent. I eagerly await seeing him in Noah Baumbach’s new film, “The Meyerowitz Stories,” which will première at Cannes next month. In the meantime, owing to Sandler’s ongoing production deal with Netflix, there’s “Sandy Wexler,” the latest feature that he has made for the company; it was released there last Friday, and I watched it so that you don’t have to. There’s no way to recommend it, yet I wouldn’t ask for my two hours back (though I do wish that they could have been sped up somewhat). “Sandy Wexler” is both an example of everything that’s wrong with what Sandler is doing under his own initiative and everything that’s right with Sandler’s artistry, which, despite the oppressive mediocrity of this new film, remains fascinating.
“Sandy Wexler,” which is set in Hollywood, almost entirely in the mid-nineteen-nineties, is Sandler’s version of Woody Allen’s “Broadway Danny Rose.” It’s a sentimental comedy (which Sandler co-wrote with Dan Bulla, Tim Herlihy, and Paul Sado, with Steven Brill directing), in which Sandler plays the title role of a scuffling talent manager whose stable of struggling artists is matched by his own social struggles. Sandy is painfully awkward in as many ways as possible—physically, verbally, emotionally. He represents his clients with a fanatical devotion that translates poorly into practical exertions. He’s always on the hustle, and part of the hustle is the lie—the lie of strategy, the lie of vanity, the lie of consolation, the lie of self-defense. He brazenly lies about what he is doing right in front of his clients’ eyes, but he does so with such a childlike earnestness that they don’t hold it against him—and, in any case, they can’t afford to hold it against him, because they likely couldn’t find anyone who’d even pretend to believe in them as fanatically as Sandy does sincerely.
Sandy’s perpetually on the Atkins diet—he eats only varieties of meat—and his table manners are famously awful. (He’s known to inadvertently soil his face with pieces of that meat.) His wardrobe is son-of-leisure suits in no-iron blends, and he has the odd habit of apologizing to his various outfits if he hasn’t worn them in a while. He has a slight speech impediment and an overemphatic manner of inflection that are rendered all the more conspicuous by the dentist’s-drill whine of his voice.
To make the cinematic filiation of “Sandy Wexler” all the plainer, his qualities and odd exploits are apostrophized, throughout the film, by a virtual chorus of famous and famous-ish people, from Chris Rock and Janeane Garofalo and Conan O’Brien to Vanilla Ice and Pauly Shore, who (like the Carnegie Deli comedians of “Broadway Danny Rose”) tell gleefully astonished tales, as if in a documentary, about this peculiar Hollywood character.
Unfortunately, this character is spun through the sluggish changes of a plodding, obvious, and oblivious story for more than two hours. While sitting in a park and watching a musical show for children, Sandy is struck by the singing talent of its star, a young woman named Courtney Clarke (Jennifer Hudson), whom he persuades to quit her job in order to launch a quest for pop stardom under his tutelage. (The persuasion involves a trip to Alaska to meet with her father, played by Aaron Neville.) So she quits, and he manages her—and she becomes, rapidly and absurdly effortlessly, a star. Meanwhile, Sandy has fallen in love with Courtney; she, in turn, has found herself a new manager (Lamorne Morris) and a series of high-profile boyfriends. Her career takes off and his career spirals downward, until circumstances, of course . . . and they . . . et cetera.
The comedy in “Sandy Wexler” is in the array of silly side plots—the mishaps of the hapless daredevil (Nick Swardson), the insults administered by the dummies of the ventriloquist (Kevin James), the night-club calamities of the standup comedian (Colin Quinn), the unfortunate auditions of the ambitious actress (Jackie Sandler), the degrading scripts of the beloved wrestler (Terry Crews), the come-ons of his next-door neighbor (Jane Seymour), the odd terms of his luxury house-sitting for a voyeuristic Iranian plutocrat (Rob Schneider). There’s also a heavy sprinkling of time-capsule humor—an allusion to O. J. Simpson and Phil Spector’s untarnished celebrity, a gibe at the commercial fortunes of Apple, praise for the long-term commercial prospects of Blockbuster Video, skepticism about the viability of a Seattle-based chain that only sells coffee, a dubious glance at the appeal of e-mail (and one actually droll nod to Sherwood Schwartz). What’s more, Sandler can’t seem to escape from an uneasy relationship with the subject of race—his 2014 comedy “Blended” was excruciatingly benighted, and “Sandy Wexler,” made with what appears to be a blandly positive benevolence, nonetheless comes off as unintentionally bewildered and bewildering with its familiar white-savior tale as well as its man-knows-best smugness. Hudson is, as ever, an engaging presence, but the character of Courtney is left bland, insubstantial, content-free.
Still, the energizing core of “Sandy Wexler” is that, despite the connection of the story to the cinematic universe of Woody Allen, Sandler’s performance—and the conception of the entire movie—is dependent upon the persona and, for that matter, the world view of Jerry Lewis. Whereas Allen portrays élitists, secret geniuses hidden in workaday circumstances, Lewis, the radical democrat, embodies the unexceptional everyman concealed in the monster. Lewis’s characters—overlooked, excluded, forgotten, dismissed—have the perpetual innocence (and disruptive, destructive force) of children. Allen’s characters reach for the gratifications and achievements of adulthood with the blinding ego of adolescents. His model of moral terror is guilt, and his fundamental drama is getting away with it or not; his exemplary metaphor is the great mother in the sky, from the short film “Oedipus Wrecks,” in the “New York Stories” trilogy. Lewis’s model of moral terror is humiliation, abandonment, rejection—his remedy is to run screaming and yell, “Ma!!!,” only to find that Ma is not there.
In “Sandy Wexler,” Sandler (and note the title—“Sand . . . ler”) absorbs his recent humiliations (however profitable they may have been for him) and displays a desire for some kind of normalcy despite the extraordinary demands of his business, despite his own extraordinary way of being. It would take a better director than Brill, however, to raise that implicit pathos into the kind of sustained comedic-dramatic art of which Sandler is eminently capable. Sandler is a comedian who doesn’t actually do anything; he’s not a physical comedian, he doesn’t tell jokes, and he’s not even a great mimic. His comedy is in his timing, his infinitesimal delay—and it’s effective because, at those moments, he’s a pure presence whose hiccups of silence conceal something far nastier, far more bitter, far uglier than anything he’s actually going to say. (Apatow taps that core of bitterness in the volatile, pain-streaked “Funny People.”) But it’s also that very presence, the power of that mere and static presence, that’s the definition of a movie star and the essence of Sandler’s own aptitude for drama as well as for comedy.
The kind of silly, hacky, schlocky comedy that Sandler makes takes a kind of bravado, a kick-me vulnerability that comes closer to the terrifying core of cinematic risk than much of the “serious” acting that passes for good and self-revealing. When the comedian dons a mask, it’s an open secret, a public dressing-up, and when a comedian stumbles it’s with a kind of public dressing-down that brings a unique, horrifying humiliation—and the step from comedic schlock to comedic genius is often just a matter of a tweak of circumstance. Mickey Rooney, overbearingly saccharine in his Andy Hardy comedies and his early musicals (and repellently racist in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), is pugnaciously sublime in the film-noir classics “Drive a Crooked Road” and “Baby Face Nelson.” There are no bad actors; there are bad directors, and there are good actors, such as Sandler, whose own tendencies—and successes—lead them astray in the absence of discerning direction.
