Adam Sandler catapulted to superstardom in the 1990s with Saturday Night Live, multi-platinum musical comedy albums, and, in the second half of the decade, a string of movies that made him a pop culture icon: Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, The Waterboy, Big Daddy, and The Wedding Singer. Some did better than others, but by the turn of the millennium, Sandler was producing movies on his own with Happy Madison, a company that’s become as much of a brand as Gracie Films. His is a friends and family operation, and people hate him for the life he has: churning out movies for Netflix, half-assing it, and making millions of dollars. He’ll do an Uncut Gems or a Punch-Drunk Love every few years, but 22 years after Paul Thomas Anderson gave Sandler the best role of his career and showed the whole world what he could do, the “serious” career eludes him. He wasn’t even nominated at the Oscars for either film—a crime. But Hollywood holds his choices against him, too.
If Sandler’s overly cautious, it might be because many of the risks he’s taken haven’t worked out: Spanglish was very good but made no impression in 2004; on the other hand, 2007’s Reign Over Me was a disaster, a maudlin September 11 drama where Sandler played a mentally-ill and traumatized widower who recalled mid-1960s Bob Dylan more than anyone else—all affected mumbling. And then, in 2009, there was Judd Apatow’s Funny People. This is where the two comedy kings of the 2000s would meet, their reigns neatly split down the middle, with a collaboration at the end of the decade.
Sandler made a comedy of his own every year of the 2000s except 2009; by then, Apatow’s own films and those he produced had taken over the comedy zeitgeist: The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Observe and Report, Year One. Only that last one remains relatively obscure, while all the others endure (especially Superbad). But it was Knocked Up that made the most money of them all, $229 million against a $25 million budget, and for Apatow’s next directorial effort, he’d have another $50 million to play with. He hired Steven Spielberg’s regular cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and megastar Sandler, both of whom must’ve been far more expensive than newcomers Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Jason Segal, and his own wife and kids.
Leslie Mann and Iris and Maude Apatow are usually the best parts of any Apatow movie from this period, and while they have more screen time in Knocked Up, their presence and behavior in Funny People is remarkable and distinct from most depictions of children in American cinema. Sandler plays an aging comic with a rare form of leukemia, and although he’s in remission by the time he visits old flame Mann up in Northern California, her husband (Eric Bana) doesn’t know; the only reason he doesn’t hate Sandler’s guts is that he thinks he’s about to die. The truth comes out, and they get into a nasty and sloppy fight on the lawn at night, upsetting Mann and wimpy friend Rogen. In most other movies with parents fighting and kids in the house, you expect them to come out and be traumatized in close-up. Not here: Iris and Maude only step out once everything’s been resolved: “What are you guys doing on the lawn?” They’re oblivious, blasé, and most importantly, above it all in every way. Apatow allows the kids in his movies to be intelligent, and that’s exceptional.
It’s just about the only exceptional thing he does at all, besides assembling star studded casts and a canny ability to incorporate contemporary pop culture and his actors’ own personae into the work. In Funny People, he uses actual footage of Sandler on talk shows alongside fake movies with real co-stars: Justin Long, Elizabeth Banks, and famous friends like Norm Macdonald, Dave Attell, Ray Romano, James Taylor, and Eminem. He has all of the elements of a successful movie comedy except the script. When Apatow would shoot a million feet of film, the crew would bring him champagne; letting the camera run like that and allowing your actors to write your movie is nothing to celebrate, especially when it ends up so baggy and loose.
Sandler demolishes his comedy persona in Funny People, playing a total prick with zero charisma and the acetone hatred of so many comics; no wonder Apatow based the character on Garry Shandling. He plays the character without any tics or accents, like Spanglish—but that guy wasn’t hateful, he was just anxious, and there’s no James L. Brooks here to make anything more than mediocre. Funny People has Sandler picking up girls after shows, mindlessly banging them before an open-mouthed and slightly horrified Rogen, laughing at children’s musical recitals, telling everyone and everything to fuck off and die, all in the most cliched way possible. He’s a very boring and angry guy without much to say, and Apatow cannot keep the movie from going down with him. There’s nothing to hold him up, and the whole thing sinks into unrefined and unexceptional nastiness, the kind of everyday life and death angst that has zero art or humor in it.
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