There are few film going pleasures more delightful than to see an actor that no one expects much from giving an amazing performance. Everyone expects great things from Jack Nicholson or Meryl Streep, so it's not as satisfying when they do knock it out of the park. But when someone like Adam Sandler comes along and gives us - for my money - the performance of the year, it's something to really savor. Sandler has been great before in Punch-Drunk Love, so I knew he had this in him, but he buries his great work under piles of dumb comedies and bland melodramas. Yet even in films like Anger Management, you could tell there were layers to his performance that the film itself did not complement. Freed from all shackles, he is finally able to deliver the most fully formed character of his career. Adam Sandler became popular at the exact moment that his brand of humor would have most appealed to me. I still consider Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison to be among the best comedies of the 90's.That said, after Little Nicky my interest in his comedy waned; I grew up and Sandler didn't. Yet he played such an important part in my early film going experience that it was hard to let that go. I still try and catch his movies from time to time, and I secretly hope he one day is able to leave behind his comedies and become a more respected actor. So my bias was certainly there to want a great performance out of him. In Funny People, he plays George Simmons, an Adam Sandler-like comedian who has reached the zenith of his career but has let fame get to him. With no real friends and no family, he is forced to deal with his diagnosis of Leukemia alone. He goes out to a comedy club to perform (his jokes consist of such winners as "what will you all do when I am gone, who will amuse you?") and quickly bombs. He is followed by Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), who rips into Simmons. Simmons decides to hire the young comic as his assistant/friend/confidant. It is from their relationship that the plot - and the humor - flows.
What struck me most about Sandler's performance was how completely unlikable he was willing to be. A real sticking point for me with a lot of big name actors is their unwillingness to be unlikable on screen. They always make the most unsavory characters redeemable, lovable even. Not Sandler. He embraces the inherent misanthropy in Simmons, making him a bitter, angry, vile person with no real sense of how to treat other people. He's like a funnier Daniel Plainview. And yet he earns our sympathy through the tricks of director Judd Apatow. Apatow fills the film with a sense of a lost past for Simmons. Sandler has had probably half his life recorded for audiences at this point, so the film uses much of that footage to gives us a history of Simmons. Perhaps the best use of such footage is from when Apatow and Sandler were roommates back before either was famous. The two would make prank phone calls and have a fun time together. This footage opens the film, and while very funny, it gives us such a strong sense of that human connection that Simmons has lost over the years. Where he once could enjoy life with his friends, fame and money have stripped that from him.
The film also wouldn't work without Rogen to balance it. He is at the opposite side of the career spectrum of Simmons, and we get the sense that he and his friends are living a similar like to Simmons and his friends pre-fame. We are asked to wonder whether they will be able to overcome that which destroyed Simmons, or whether they will follow in his footsteps. We can already see seeds of a similar life path and jadedness in the character played by Jason Schwartzman, but Rogen seems like a levelheaded enough person to avoid it. It is these wonderful character dynamics that make the whole piece really shine.
For me, Funny People was a perfect confection of humor, drama, acting, characters, story, themes - everything I could want from a motion picture - for the first hour and a half. Really just perfect. But it's a two and a half hour movie, and as a result, it starts to lose its power with the final hour. Apatow has always been a self indulgent filmmaker, and it has worked in his favor before. Here he goes too far, unfortunately, and it honestly could ruin the whole experience for a lot of people. As he did in Knocked Up, he casts his wife and two children in the film. Here, however, they become the central focus of the film for the final hour, taking the focus off of Simmons and his relationship with Ira. This segment was vital to sending home the message of Simmons being doomed to stay the unhappy person he is, but it could have been done in about twenty minutes or so. When Leslie Mann breaks out a home video of her and Apatow's daughter in a school performance of Cats, it's clear that Apatow has gone far off into his own head.
And yet, I love that a filmmaker would make a movie for himself first and foremost. Apatow's passion for these characters and their world shines through in spite of (or perhaps because of) that final hour. It's not a film for everybody, and especially not a film for those expecting the usual Sandler comedy, but it was the perfect film for me. It's a real shame that Sandler won't be remembered come Oscar season, because I really feel that he rises above other comedians turned dramatic actors of late (Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell) and delivers a brilliant performance. The real heart breaker, though, is that this film won't make as much money as his usual fare, and he will go back to starring in low rent David Spade or Kevin James comedies. I hope that the great actor hiding within Sandler doesn't stay hidden again for long, but when movies about man-babies and mermen make more money than thoughtful comedy-dramas, I guess it's only inevitable.
