This is mostly a review of Reign Over Me, but the reviewer tackles the overwhelming issue that leads to its' apparent flaws:
HARD REIGN
By LOU LUMENICK
March 23, 2007 -- GIVE Adam Sandler credit for using his clout to make Hollywood's first mainstream movie about the fallout from 9/11, "Reign Over Me."
Outfitted in a graying Bob Dylan wig, the king of goofball comedy isn't half bad in a rare serious role as a man who withdraws from society after the loss of his family.
But Mike Binder's oddball film keeps retreating into fantasy - as if to avoid precisely the kind of issues that have kept the studios from confronting the legacy of 9/11.
The excellent "United 93'' and the merely good "World Trade Center'' depicted that day's horrible events, and Spike Lee's little-seen "25th Hour'' used Ground Zero as a dramatic backdrop, but Hollywood has left the legacy of 9/11 to scrappy independent films.
Whether it's because they agree with the "too soon'' crowd that shunned last year's films or because they're afraid of being accused of exploitating a still-fresh tragedy, the studios have been wary of depicting one of America's most dramatic events. So in this context, "Reign Over Me'' is a mildly hopeful sign, even though its execution leaves much to be desired. Sandler's character, Charlie Fineman, lost his wife and three young daughters when their plane crashed into the World Trade Center.
Settlements have allowed him to give up his dental practice. Five years on, he is still barricading himself in an apartment which he constantly renovates, when he isn't playing a video called (irony alert) Shadow of the Colossus.
Charlie emerges occasionally to cruise the improbably empty streets of Manahttan on a motorized skateboard; during one of these excursions he encounters Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle), who recognizes Charlie as his dental school roommate (though shellshocked Charlie at first doesn't remember Alan).
By this point, we've seen Alan's own set of problems - an overbearing wife (Jada Pinkett Smith) and business partners.
Alan is played with great skill and dramatic shading by Cheadle.
Still, Alan is essentially what Spike Lee and other black film experts refer to as a "magic Negro" - a black character who exists primarily to help the white protagonist.
True to type, Alan dutifully accompanies the emotionally arrested Charlie to a Mel Brooks triple feature at the Cinema Village, watches him play the drums at Webster Hall, and even persuades him to see a shrink.
To give you an idea of the film's reality level, the therapist is played by Liv Tyler.
And she isn't the only babe on hand. Poor Charlie gets to leer at one of Alan's dishy nymphomanic patients (Saffron Burrows), who seems to wandered out of an episode of Binder's HBO series "The Mind of a Married Man."
There are a few nice, well-observed moments in here. Sandler is very good in the scene where Charlie recovers his memory of that horrible day in September, even if Binder (the "Upside of Anger" director who also plays Charlie's lawyer) hits you over the head with it.
While Sandler projects rage extremely well, the film takes a seriously bad turn when Charlie - shaken by his contact with reality - goes all "Taxi Driver" on us.
He ends up at a Hollywood-style sanity hearing not unlike the one Sandler faced in "Mr. Deeds" - where he is pitted against his late wife's parents he has shunned (Robert Klein and Melinda Dillon) and their button-pushing lawyer.
In real life, no sane Manhattan judge (Donald Sutherland plays the one here) would take the responsibility for letting Charlie "find himself" on the streets under the circumstances.
But it's not exactly a surprise the makers of "Reign Over Me" feel compelled to manufacture a happy ending for a story that really has none. Pity.
lou.lumenick@nypost.com
http://www.nypost.com/seven/03232007/entertainment/movies/hard_reign_movies_lou_lumenick.htm?page=1
