Reign Over Me (2007)

This might be the best movie to deal with the 9/11 attacks out there. At first that isn't clear, but once you are done you realize that's all that matters. Out of nowhere, a tragedy and its personal consequences.

Of course, this is also a movie about a very unselfish friendship. Don Cheadle leads this movie top to bottom (this is the Adam Sandler movie that is really a Don Cheadle movie). And his unshakeable kindness and patience with ex-roommate Sandler is beautifully rendered. Cheadle's acting has a whole range of subtle gestures and hesitations that are clearly his, beyond what any director might offer. As the successful dentist in his late model Volvo wagon, he represents what Sandler, the man suffering from loss and psychological instability, once had.

Sandler is sort of perfect as a choice in this role partly because he's cast against type and that's the dynamic of the movie--a man who should be very different from what you see. The whole time you can picture the lively loving Sandler, and not the wreck before you. He plays the part with the quirks and inwardness you might expect, and it's not quite brilliant. He ends up supporting the shine of Cheadle's lead.

Another aspect to the movie, probably not unintended, is the beauty of New York, and the romantic lure of its ordinary streets. There are no landmarks here, just regular life in regular Manhattan.

The one slight drag on the whole affair, and I'm not sure how this could have been avoided without a wholly different plot, is the attempts to bring Sandler out of his hole. One aspect is professional psychiatry, which makes sense, and is pretty well done. (I found the depiction of an accomplished shrink by Liv Tyler really good.) But the other aspect, meant I suppose to add some spice to the cast, is the nutty and sharply beautiful presence of an outlier character, a woman who just happens along first into Cheadle's world and then by extension (and some unbelievable coincidence) into Sandler's. Saffron Burrows plays the part well but it seems forced into the scene--at times funny and poignant but, as with several other minor characters like the in-laws, mostly caricatured or out of place.

Not that anything is ever quite out of place in fiction. Fiction with a strong strain of truth giving it its depth. Director and writer Mike Binder has managed to pull together a gem that refers, ever so gently, to 9/11, and to some deeply caring New Yorkers who all, as a larger group, all suffered from the attacks. "Reign over Me" did not get the attention you might have expected. It's possibly because it's such a depressing movie, whatever its upbeat moments. But it's beautifully sad, like maybe we imagine some of the best European films to be, and I really recommend it on those terms.