Adam Sandler has built a career out of playing characters whose internal logic is so skewed as to render them unrecognizable as human beings. Over the years, he has portrayed a stuttering waterboy, the son of Satan and a man given a remote control that can alter time and space. Nevertheless, it's in his newest dramatic turn, Mike Binder's ""Reign Over Me,"" that Sandler plays his least believable character yet—a Sept. 11 widower.
""Reign Over Me"" finds Don Cheadle (excellent as usual) as Alan Johnson, a New York dentist with a loving wife, two beautiful daughters, a successful practice and a looming sense of dissatisfaction. Enter Charlie Fineman (Sandler), Alan's college roommate, who since the death of his wife and daughters on 9/11, has spent the past four years riding around New York on a motor scooter stuffing his face with Chinese food and drowning out the real world with the help of his iPod.
After a chance encounter, the two men rekindle their friendship, which Alan uses to escape his family; and Charlie, his life. Unfortunately, Alan can't help but open up old wounds, and soon pushes Charlie to confront his loss—a confrontation that nearly breaks him.
Meanwhile, Alan has problems of his own, most notably, Donna Remar (Saffron Burrows), a patient who stalks him, and when he refuses an offer of oral sex, she slaps him with a sexual harassment lawsuit. Add to that several subplots involving conspiring co-workers, pushy in-laws, shady accountants and an ineffectual therapist, and it's all Binder can do to carry a juggling act marred by miscalculation at every turn.
Strangely, Binder is hardly new to the territory of grieving. His critically lauded and criminally underwatched 2005 film, ""The Upside of Anger,"" presented Joan Allen as an alcoholic single mother dealing with abandonment after her husband left her for his secretary. In it, Binder proved himself an adept writer capable of infusing even the most painful scenes with spot-on humor. Unfortunately, ""Reign"" never achieves the same balance, going from maudlin to mirthful without a moment's notice.
The film's biggest problem, however, is its depiction of mental illness. In the most bizarre portrayal of grief since ""The Fisher King,"" Charlie's post traumatic stress disorder is simply over-the-top. Watching him play video games, jam out to air guitar and make candid comments about ""boobies,"" it's impossible to imagine him as the functional family man and practicing dentist he allegedly was before the tragedy.
Equally perplexing is Donna, who after discovering that her husband had an affair, decides that the only solution is to give her dentist a blow job. These characters are not merely in pain—they're painful to watch, and in their nonsensical actions, seem unlikely to exist anywhere beyond the pages of a screenplay.
This is not Sandler's first foray into serious drama (""Punch Drunk Love"" and ""Spanglish"" come to mind), but with any hope, it may be his last. As much as one might be tempted to commend him for branching out, it's simply impossible to get involved in the drama when at every turn, it's Billy Madison mumbling and Bobby Boucher yelling—not Charlie Fineman. Ultimately, the Adam Sandler persona is too much for Binder to keep in check, proving that while you can take the Sandler out of ""Happy Gilmore,"" you can't take the Happy Gilmore out of Sandler.
