Whatever happened to Adam Sandler? We know exactly where he is, but many of us in the audience for his movies have been wondering where he’s gone. The beloved star of “Saturday Night Live” built a cozy cinematic niche for himself as a charming man-child in the 1990s, starring in harmlessly juvenile – but often sneakily sentimental – films like Happy Gilmore, The Water Boy and Big Daddy. But at some point over the past decade his output deteriorated into high-concept but drab family fare (Click, Bedtime Stories) and grossly insensitive exercises in potty humor and bullying (Jack & Jill, That’s My Boy, Grown Ups 2).
Whither goest thou, ye olde Adam Sandler? And was 50 First Dates your last hurrah?
Ten years ago today, 50 First Dates premiered in theaters and was the Valentine’s Day movie of choice for American audiences. (The film earned a still-incredible $51 million on its opening weekend alone.) 50 First Dates paired Sandler with his old The Wedding Singer co-star Drew Barrymore, banking on the previous film’s crossover popularity – it attracted fans of Sandler’s dopier schtick and admirers of milquetoast romantic comedies alike – as well as the stars’ well-documented chemistry to elevate a rather strange, intellectually disturbing conceit: that of a man who falls in love with a woman who suffers from a rare form of Anterograde amnesia, which causes her to lose all memory of their relationship at the end of every day.
So although their affection for one another is genuine, Henry Roth (Sandler) has to woo Lucy Whitmore (Barrymore) all over again, every single day. The film plays with the notion that Roth is a Hawaiian playboy, a local who seduces vacationers with romantic lies to avoid getting bogged down in a serious relationship and abandon his dreams of studying walruses in Alaska. (He’s a veterinarian at a never-named Sea World type of establishment.) So the notion of a relationship that can never graduate to full-fledged commitment, permanently stuck on its “first date,” would presumably appeal to him.
But 50 First Dates abandons this conceit as soon as Henry learns of Lucy’s condition. His best friend Ula (Rob Schneider, playing an offensive stereotype, one of many he has been reduced to in Sandler’s comedies, although of late he seems to have passed that torch to Nick Swardson) suggests that Lucy is the perfect girlfriend for a commitment-phobic individual, but Henry brushes off the idea out of hand because, to his credit, he says, “It’s evil.” In theory, Henry’s womanizing backstory is an effort to illustrate his personal growth, although – unusual for a romantic comedy, or any other genre for that matter – that subplot is resolved less than halfway through the movie. In practice, it’s just filler: something for Sandler to talk about until 50 First Dates‘ real story finally gets started.
At first, Henry seems merely intrigued by Lucy’s condition, and eagerly tries to engineer new “meet cutes” every single day, because for whatever reason the same one doesn’t work every time. But once he learns the depth of Lucy’s brain damage – she was injured in a car accident – and also the depths to which her father Marlin (Blake Clark) and brother Doug (Sean Astin, playing the unusual role of a steroid-abusing lisper) have been going to keep her in the dark, Henry is inspired to try to help her reclaim some semblance of a life instead.
Whereas Marlin and Doug have been reliving the same day over and over again to spare Lucy the shock of realizing the horror of her situation – and presumably to spare themselves the heartache of watching that revelation tear her apart every day for the rest of their lives – Henry gives Lucy enough credit to deal with her unusual situation, and he has the patience necessary to support her through that crisis on a regular basis. With Henry’s help Lucy develops coping mechanisms to come to terms with her condition every morning, and regain a sense of a continuity in a life which would otherwise have had none.
Although the impetus for 50 First Date’s plot is Hollywood fiction, a plot device with an only tangential relationship to real medical conditions, Sandler and Barrymore are natural on-screen partners. Their romantic chemistry feels off-the-cuff, rarely scripted. The way they both do a little victory dance after they first meet and first flirt (for the first time) is apex adorable. The way Barrymore’s delivery feels surprising and new during every “first date” is aided by unexpected revelations, like Lucy’s willingness to beat Ula to death with an aluminum baseball bat (one of the film’s comedic highlights), but more importantly by an actress who injects even a character who exists mostly to push a deeply contrived plot forward with energy, wit and an impressive inner strength.
But the cracks were already showing in Sandler’s cinematic façade. Although he once again proves himself capable of everyman humor and relatable emotional fragility, 50 First Dates can barely let a single touching moment go by without diffusing itself with forced interjections from Rob Schneider or Lusia Strus, who plays Sandler’s assistant Alexa, the brunt of many jokes about her mannish appearance and sexual urges, which contrast, supposedly, with her lack of conventional sex appeal.
The film’s attempt to dramatize serious issues within a relationship, a family and the arch but far-reaching implications of its plot is undone time and time again by what appears to be an extreme lack of confidence. 50 First Dates isn’t allowed to be a sweet movie, it must also be what we now call an “Adam Sandler Movie,” complete with projectile walrus vomit and cruel jokes at the expense of non-white races and non-traditional gender types. (Although at least Alexa gets a happy ending.) 50 First Dates seems to be fighting itself at every turn, staving off an invasion of crass, unnecessarily broad gags even though the heart – something Sandler movies used to balance easily with jokes of many stripes – was perfectly capable of holding this film aloft all on its own.
50 First Dates was preceded by one attempt from Sandler to play it straight, or at least apply his well-established comic persona to a serious movie: Punch-Drunk Love, a whirligig of overpowering anxiety and genuine yet deeply eccentric love from Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson. The film failed to attract Sandler’s core demographic, and the actor only made one attempt at “serious cinema” in the years that followed, the even less popular – and significantly less acclaimed – post-9/11 drama Reign Over Me. (Judd Apatow’s Funny People, a box office disappointment from 2009, may also arguably count.) It is also worth noting that Paul Thomas Anderson’s films haven’t indulged in an iota of levity ever since.
One senses, from the outside looking in, that 50 First Dates was a retreat into the safety of both cozy schmaltz and easy punchlines for Sandler. He’d had another comedy hit the year previous with 2003’s Anger Management, but perhaps the novelty of co-starring in a broad farce with Jack Nicholson (with Sandler as the straight man, no less) was more integral to that film’s success. With 50 First Dates Sandler was back in his wheelhouse. He had officially earned his audience back. Perhaps… just perhaps… he vowed to never lose them again, leading to increasingly drab family fare and increasingly crass pandering to gross-out enthusiasts. Sometimes even both extremes simultaneously, as we saw in the confusing combination of cruelty and domesticity they called Grown Ups 2.
I don’t know Adam Sandler, but I miss him. I miss the days when he played cartoons that became likable human beings. I miss the days when he played anything even resembling a human being. 50 First Dates is ten years old. You can tell because there’s a joke about the Red Sox never winning the World Series (Drew Barrymore would star in Fever Pitch one year later, a film that had to change its ending at the last minute when the Red Sox surprisingly did win in late 2004). It all flew by so fast. Perhaps ten years is a very long time after all, practically an entire generation by pop culture standards. A whole generation: that’s how long it’s been since there was an “Adam Sandler Movie” that didn’t make me sad.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
