Sandler Happens

By RICHARD CORLISS

A few good things about Adam Sandler comedies: they cost about one-tenth of Titanic to produce; they're usually over in 90 minutes; they keep projectionists employed and kids off the streets; their brain-numbing effects often wear off within hours. And, well, somebody's got to make stupid movies.

But why do so many people have to go see them? That's the question that has movie solons tugging at their gray beards and wondering exactly how many teenage boys--and the women who love them--can pack a movie house on an autumn weekend. The answer: $39.4 million worth. That's how much money Sandler's wan The Waterboy earned in its first weekend--a record for any non-summer three-day opening, and proof indeed that, while Oprah Winfrey may not be a film star, Adam Sandler surely is. This veteran of Saturday Night Live (remember Opera Man? Cajun Man? why?) now joins Will Smith and Jim Carrey as top movie money earners under 40. And in Hollywood, for just this moment, he is an even rarer commodity: a bargain. After three days in the plexes, The Waterboy made back its meager $23 million budget.

Understanding Adam is a tough task for those hobbled by age or taste. The typical Sandler comedy (not this year's amiable The Wedding Singer, in which he plays a borderline grownup, but Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore and the new film) is about a nerdy sociopath who learns to channel his rage into an acceptable format: winning a spelling bee, playing golf or tackling football players. "You don't have what they call the social skills," he is told in The Waterboy; that is Sandler's gimmick and, for many, his charm. The plot is a competition for which our hero is utterly unqualified but which he always wins, over some smarmy exemplar of the status quo and in a climax tinged with sentiment and demagoguery. After a Sandler speech in Billy Madison, the principal sagely notes that "everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it." That's how many people feel after watching a Sandler movie.

"His movies tend to remind us of being in sixth grade again," says Frank Coraci, director of The Wedding Singer and The Waterboy--and, like Sandler-film screenwriter Tim Herlihy, a pal of the star's since they were all at New York University a decade ago. That's exactly right. The films are full of preadolescent aggression, exaggerated for laughs. In Billy Madison, Sandler gets his kicks by leaving a bag of flaming feces at a neighbor's door, saying the F word in a roomful of first-graders, mocking a stuttering boy. As a clumsy hockey player in Happy Gilmore, Sandler kills his dad with an errant slap shot. The films' running gag is of an innocent bystander getting clobbered by a sharp object. Pain is funny, if it's not yours. And the star can do anything, because he's our guy. In short, an Adam Sandler comedy is very like an early Jim Carrey comedy.

"Ah," we hear you saying, "but Jim Carrey is funny!" Yep. Sandler is Carrey or Jerry Lewis without the physical dexterity, Danny Kaye without the verbal grace, Steve Martin without the patrician veneer. In the longer movie view, he's Abbott without Costello. Moviemakers and critics were probably not thrilled that, in 1941, with a mediocre B movie called Buck Privates, Bud and Lou were briefly Hollywood's top stars. What can we say? People want to laugh--at anything. Sandler happens.

"Sandler is a non-threatening class clown, like your older or younger brother," observes Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations Co., a boxoffice tracking firm in Los Angeles. And if you don't get Sandler's humor, says his former SNL boss Lorne Michaels, "then I take it you are not a 12-year-old boy. It's unfair to put Adam's comedies into the larger world of film. It is like comparing candy to the whole world of food. Everyone knows what a Snickers is and why you like it. To deconstruct it, to point out that it only has peanuts and chocolate, is to take all the fun out of eating it."

Critics can snicker, but Hollywood may soon renounce Evian and tofu for an all-Sandler diet. With the tanking of tony pictures like Beloved and One True Thing, while There's Something About Mary goes stratospheric and the Jackie Chan-Chris Tucker Rush Hour earns an astonishing $130 million, nobrow comedy is a genre for all seasons. It's a new world out there, folks. The idiots have taken over the asylum. And Adam Sandler is the Dominator of Dumb. Get used to it.

--With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles