Movie Review: Reign Over Me
In Reign Over Me -- derived from a song on The Who's album "Quadrophenia" -- Adam Sandler tries to take on the suffering of an entire city. The city is New York, and the minute someone refers to Sandler's character, Charlie Fineman, as "the one from dental school whose family was on the plane," you know exactly the event that has triggered his grief, pain and disconnection.
Yes, Charlie is one of the walking wounded --- or would that be walking dead? --- who slipped into a kind of anguished, self-protective coma the day the World Trade Center fell. Who had the one thing he couldn't live without taken away from him. So he lives without ... sort of.
Looking like mid-'60s Dylan and behaving at times like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, Charlie tools around Manhattan on a scooter, earphones firmly clasped to his head, filling it with the soundtrack of the '70s, when everything seemed possible. At home, he plays a video game called "Shadow of the Colossus" on a colossal screen and engages in the Sisyphean task of remodeling the kitchen, tearing it down and starting over (his last conversation with his wife was about redoing the kitchen).
The world intrudes in the form of Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle), a successful dentist who was Charlie's roommate at school. Alan has a fine wife (Jada Pinkett Smith, too seldom seen in movies these days) and two adorable daughters, but he's feeling hemmed in. His rescue-and-recovery mission --- he runs into Charlie accidentally --- is genuine, but it's also a bit selfish. He envies his friend's freedom without initially realizing that, as the song goes, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.
Writer-director Mike Binder (The Upside of Anger) gives his movie a strange, meandering quality, almost as if we were inside Charlie's head. Occasionally, you feel restless; other times, you're slightly disappointed by the film's more predictable moments. And at more than two hours, it overstays its welcome.
But the characters and the cast hold you. Not just the stars, but also The Lord of the Rings Liv Tyler (much less elfin now, but a much better actor) as a sympathetic shrink; Melinda Dillon and Robert Klein as Charlie's frustrated in-laws; gorgeous Saffron Burrows in the unlikely role of a psychotic dental patient; and Donald Sutherland in a cameo as a wise and leonine judge.
Playing a man who sees his family every day on the streets in the faces of others gingerly negotiating their own private no man's land, Sandler is remarkable, expertly using the vacancy that defines his dumb-and-dumber comedies as a way to convey Charlie's netherworld. Cheadle is every bit as good in a more difficult --- that is to say, less showy --- role. It has none of the explosions and cosmic clowning granted his co-star. But we expect that of Cheadle; at this point in his career, he's routinely brilliant.
Reign Over Me wants to bring comfort. It may not; everyone has their own very particular fallout from Sept. 11. But it will certainly spark conversation. Most importantly, this movie, though not entirely successful, is neither dumb nor exploitative. Rather, it's sensitive, heartfelt and sincere. Whether its timing is right is entirely a matter of opinion.
***
