Rote Rage
by Ed Owens

My eight-month-old daughter has started feeding herself - sort of. Now, instead of my gracelessly guiding a small spoonful of food to her cheek, she grabs the spoon and gracefully guides it on to her head. It's a small milestone, to be sure, but one step closer to the day I will catch a glimpse of her in a Girls Gone Wild commercial and suffer the mild stroke that will pay the rest of her way through college. It's almost enough to make a father proud. The drawback is that sometimes she still wants to be fed, acting as if she understands the feeding process about as well as she grasps Euclidean Geometry. It's frustrating, especially since I can't blame her for the inevitable mess that results. Equally frustrating is watching an actor follow up a mature performance with a juvenile return to mediocre form--or, in the case of Anger Management, two actors.

Jack Nicholson showed unusual restraint in last year's About Schmidt, leading many to believe that he actually had talent after all, while Adam Sandler let Paul Thomas Anderson put his infantile tantrums to good use in the wonderfully eccentric Punch Drunk Love. But the stench of critical acclaim and the threat of respectability apparently proved too much for this dynamic duo.

In Anger Management, Sandler's man-child pet clothes designer Dave Buzznik is all happy without the Gilmore, a restrained uptight yuppie wannabe that internalizes his anger rather than exploding the way many of Sandler's fans have come to know and love. He is erroneously sentenced to anger management under the tutelage of oddly aggressive therapist Dr. Buddy Rydell (Nicholson, chewing more scenery than in The Shining, The Witches of Eastwick, and Batman combined). The remaining 90+ minutes is a woefully unfunny series of visual gags and sophomoric setpieces that made me cringe far more often than laugh.

So much of Anger Management is by the numbers that even the generous sprinkling of cameos can't keep it from listing heavily (for some odd reason, Sandler has a way of taking even respectable actors down with him). Director Peter Segal, whose previous accomplishments include the surprisingly funny Tommy Boy and the alarmingly unfunny Nutty Professor 2, eschews the good-natured asides of the former in favor of the mean-spirited frat-boy lewdness of the latter, lurching from setup to setup with a machine-like precision that manages to hit the lowest common denominator every time. Certainly, David Dorfman's first time at bat as a screenwriter gave him little to work with, but Nicholson and Sandler surely had more to bring to the plate than the furious flailing on display here.

Sandler and Nicholson's discomfort was funny under the hands of Paul Thomas Anderson and Alexander Payne respectively because we were allowed to share in it, not merely point and laugh mockingly from the outside. By the time Woody Harrelson shows up as a transvestite prostitute in Anger Management, the only discomfort is our own at being expected to laugh at such a miscalculated schoolyard prank, and at the realization that perhaps the talent on display last year was not in the actors, but the directors.

©2003 Ed Owens
CineScene