Anger Management Review
by Karina Montgomery (karina AT cinerina DOT com)April 28th, 2003
Anger Management
Catch it on HBO
Maybe it's a guy thing. The guys seem to like it. Myself, I did laugh at certain things, but most of the time I was writhing in anxiety. The guys reply, "maybe you were identifying too much with Sandler's character." (Yes, I hang out with people who talk like that.) I think it is actually the opposite. As you have deduced from the preview, Sandler plays a mild-mannered doormat named Dave who gets unjustifiably slapped into an unorthodox and frankly extremely vexing Anger Management program. This succeeds in little more than making him, well, actually angry. And this is supposed to be good. I think a little more development besides one terrible childhood trauma should have helped us understand how he got caught in this terrible, cruel cycle of torment by his own doing, rather than just out and out victimizing him for 98 of the 101 minutes of the movie.
Perhaps the reasons are not important. OK, let's get on with the jokes. Watching Sandler get victimized for an hour and a half is only very occasionally funny. Wisely taking a cue from his Punch Drunk Love character, Sandler is restrained and nebbishy, which works for him here, much better than his crazed Farley impressions in previous outings. He's acting, and he's holding a sympathetic character in a sea of turmoil. Which is good, but it's not particularly funny. It is unfair to say that the film has nothing funny in it. It does. But if it weren't for the continual parade of cameos (by extremely strong, wonderful actors, many of whom graduated from the Coen brothers and P.T. Anderson schools of absurdist comedies), even less of this movie would have been funny. Is it technically funny to see someone try desperately not to get angry when people are being horrible and insane to him? Once in a great while.
The cameos, actually, are great, which you might recall was the nicest thing I could think to say about the third Austin Powers movie. This is much better than that, of course, but it benefits mostly from the cameos being sprinkled throughout the movie and carrying most of the weight. John Turturro, is a delicious madman. John C. "Midas" Reilly is a welcome sight by the time he shows up. Marisa Tomei is a ray of sanity and her on-screen best friend and major Sandler film alum Andrew (Allen Covert) is a good sport about his role. Sandler, as the hapless one, reacts as the audience is already feeling, so he doesn't get so many of the jokes for himself. He generously hands them off to Jack Nicolson and Luis Guzman and Turturro and Covert and even Woody Harrelson. Unfortunately, since Sandler is on screen all the time, his generosity leaves us a little dry in the inbetween times.
More than once, Nicholson reminded me of McMurphy in Cuckoo's Nest; while this works great for the film, it really just scared the crap out of me. In a comedy, there is an unspoken web of safety that surrounds your hero, and Nicholson was constantly terrifying me that he would do something genuinely mad. While this was effective on the dramatic level, I was honestly too anxious and too stunned by the onslaught of agonizing disasters and sad injustices to enjoy the performance as I should. It's got to be a dude thing.
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These reviews (c) 2003 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks. You can check out previous reviews at:
http://www.cinerina.com and http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com - the Online Film Critics Society http://www.hsbr.net/reviews/karina/listing.hsbr - Hollywood Stock Exchange Brokerage Resource
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