Anger Management

The poster for Anger Management is an inspired marketing maneuver: Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson, nose-to-nose, screaming in each other’s faces. It promises an intriguing combination, riffing on the public perceptions of Sandler, who usually plays characters with preposterously short fuses, and Nicholson, who, in real life, settled a traffic dispute with a golf club. “Heeere’s Johnny,” indeed.

While Nicholson undeniably adds scene-chewing appeal, this is primarily an Adam Sandler vehicle, replete with all the requisite lowbrow dross we’ve come to expect: flatulence, dick jokes and cartoon violence. This will come as a relief to Sandler aficionados after their hero’s recent roster of more atypical projects (the Mr. Deeds remake, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love, and the animated 8 Crazy Nights), although Sandler’s trademark irritating obnoxiousness is mercifully toned down in a subdued role. Nicholson capably fills that particular void with relish; with a disheveled beard and his straggly hair standing on end, he looks something like Salman Rushdie on speed, deliciously hamming with that devilish grin and those elastic eyebrows on full parade. But even Jack can’t save what is essentially a one-joke movie; we’re reminded of Robert De Niro’s participation in such lame turkeys as Showtime and Analyze That.

Sandler plays mild-mannered Dave Buznik, a shy, self-deprecating designer at a pet products company, who loves his fiancée, Linda (a criminally underused Marisa Tomei), despite being too timid to kiss her in public. Through a series of bizarre in-flight misapprehensions he is misdiagnosed as a person filled with suppressed rage, and assigned to therapy with famed anger specialist Dr. Buddy Rydell (Nicholson).

Rydell introduces Dave to a therapy group, including Luis Guzman, as a gay hood with a paunch fettered by Day-Glo spandex, and John Turturro as Dave’s “anger buddy.” Both are unmistakably wacko — and so, it would seem, is Dr. Rydell, as Dave finds himself trapped in an escalating spiral of trouble and court appearances. Dave initially thinks Buddy’s methods are unorthodox, and when the unconventional Dr moves in with him for “intensive counseling” and starts flirting with Dave’s sweetheart he’s even less impressed. Is Buddy a heretical genius or a manipulative Svengali twisting Dave’s life to suit his own ends? Or is he just a couple of couches short of a therapy certificate?

Rydell, a loose canon with an explosive temper, is more in need of anger management than his client, despite his predilection for homilies like ”Temper is one thing we never get rid of by losing it.” For a while, the set-up, poking fun at America’s obsession with self-help and pop psychology, provides humor, and touches of absurdity in David Dorfman’s script provide glimmers of hope. One of best scenes sees Buddy forcing Dave to park in the middle of snarling, rush-hour traffic to accompany him in a rousing rendition of the West Side Story torch song I Feel Pretty. However, the patchy screenplay gets stuck floundering in a one-way street and runs out of ideas.

With Tommy Boy and Nutty Professor 2 on his resume, director Peter Segal is no stranger to this sort of comedy. Sandler controls most of his movies himself (he’s executive producer this time), but his most critically well-received performance to date came when he relinquished control for Punch Drunk Love to Paul Thomas Anderson. While the pair seemed the unlikeliest of bedfellows (or at least as unlikely as Sandler sharing a bed with a naked Jack Nicholson, as calamitously occurs in Anger Management), for once Sandler was in a sharp film that unlocked a dark, soulful potential inherent in most of his screen personas (which vary little) and he displayed hitherto unsuspected depths. Here he steps out of his usual volatile persona, demonstrating a facility for underplaying surprise; Dave is one of the few Sandler creations who doesn’t seem to need anger management — his likeable soft-centered demeanor brings warmth to the wackiness.

This creates a problem in itself: Sandler, playing it relatively straight, undermines Anger Management by unevenly blending an ostensibly character-based comedy with exaggerated farcical lunacy. Any film that expects us to care about the emotional journeys of its characters can’t afford to digress with cringe-worthy walk-ons from Rudolph Giuliani and John McEnroe. The way the movie piles on cameos, such as Woody Harrelson as a German drag queen known for “lickinzeedickin,” smacks of desperation. That said, the brilliant John C Reilly’s bit part, as a monk with a wedgie, was reportedly one of the film’s redeeming features, but Thai audiences are deprived the chance to judge for themselves by the censors who have culled all traces of Reilly from the film.