Reign Over Me.

"Like Spike Lee's 25th Hour, writer-director Mike Binder's Reign Over Me is less expressly about 9/11 than about how New Yorkers have tried (and in some cases failed) to reassemble life in the aftermath," writes the LA Weekly's Scott Foundas, "and if Binder has a considerably heavier hand when it comes to metaphor, his movie nevertheless remains buoyant because the feelings in it are immutable, and because [Adam] Sandler has never before held the screen with greater intensity."

"It's rare to see so many moments of grace followed by so many stumbles and fumbles, or to see intelligence and discretion undone so thoroughly by glibness and grossness," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "And it is puzzling, and ultimately draining, to see a film that waves the flag of honesty - Face your demons! Speak from your heart! Open up! - turn out to be so phony." That said: "The best scenes are those that give [Don] Cheadle and Mr Sandler room to play against each other, to bring their very different temperaments into a workable syncopation."

Updated through 3/27.

"Like the Detroit-born writer-director's The Upside of Anger (2005), complicated emotions and generous digressions make for unusually intelligent and involving drama," writes Ray Pride; he also interviews Binder.

"Binder manages to prop up his story's sloppiest, sappiest moments by allowing Charlie [Sandler] to bluntly and effectively articulate his misery (and his means of handling it)," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "It's a saving grace that helps moderately buoy this bruised-and-battered portrait of inconsolable grief, and one that, to the film's lasting credit, is matched by a final display of faith not in feel-good recovery but, rather, in the less cheery, more realistic belief that some losses are so cataclysmic, it's next to impossible to ever truly emerge from the resultant rubble."

"[F]ew actors have enjoyed a promotional ride like Sandler has this week, most of it just like the film's tagline 'Let In The Unexpected,'" blogs Nikki Finke.

Updates, 3/23: Kevin Crust, writing in the Los Angeles Times, finds Reign "an ardent man-love ode to rock in both its soft and hard forms.... Binder uses rock - memorably the Pretenders, Jackson Browne and Bruce Springsteen - in a refreshing way to reflect the intricacies of the relationships. What pours out of Charlie's iPod might as well be coming from his broken heart, but Binder's choices keep things surprisingly spirited. Movies about male friendship are often trivialized with the 'buddy' tag, but this one resonates beyond that."

A "soppy, sentimental take on the aftermath of 9/11," writes DK Holm for Nerve. "Reign Over Me presumes that the only counterpoint to funny is sad."

"Feel left out because you didn't have a personal connection with anyone on one of those ill-fated flights, or with a firefighter who lost his life, or with any of the thousands who couldn't escape the World Trade Center?" asks Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Not to worry. In Reign Over Me, 9/11 victimhood is for everyone: You can feel the exhilaration of recovery without going to the trouble of suffering the pain that necessitates it in the first place.... Reign Over Me, ostensibly a drama about getting past 9/11, only turns the event into a shrink-to-fit tragedy, just big enough to fill a movie screen - barely."

R Emmet Sweeney, writing for the Reeler, finds it "a failure worth grappling with; deep wells of fury and compassion are secreted beneath its scattershot narrative."

Online viewing tip. David Poland lunches with Mike Binder.

Update, 3/25: "As wrongheaded as Reign Over Me is, Mr Sandler can always look to the [Bill] Murray career model: there is hope ahead, and depth in less pompous projects," writes Caryn James in a piece for the NYT on comic actors gone serious.

Update, 3/26: "Reign Over Me is the rare studio film with the fullness of a novel—a novel that reels and overreaches and never finds its footing," writes New York's David Edelstein. "Cheadle is a blessedly centered actor, and Sandler is up to his inevitable let-it-all-out Big Scenes. (The timing might be a tad unfortunate for the one in which he points a gun at two NYPD cops, who carefully disarm him instead of shooting him 41 times.) But the film is slick when it needs to be raw, tidy when it needs to sprawl, and amorphous when it needs to focus."

Update, 3/27: In a similar vein as Caryn James, Carina Chocano in the LAT: "Reign Over Me might have been a better movie with someone other than Sandler in the role of Charlie Fineman, just as I Think I Love My Wife might have benefited from better acting in the lead role. But that they exist at all is preferable to their not having been made. And if this is due in part to comedians wanting to get serious for a moment, maybe we shouldn't complain."

Posted by dwhudson at March 22, 2007 5:06 PM