The Wedding Singer (1998)
Director: Frank Coraci

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As Robbie Hart, a wedding singer living and working in Ridgefield, a small northern New Jersey town, in 1985, Adam Sandler makes the character’s amateur standing clear, yet gives his audiences, both in and at the movie, unalloyed pleasure. The pleasure is different for the two audiences--the members of the wedding party in the first sequence don’t see him as we do, as a second string entertainer specializing in hoarse renditions of only semi-memorable hits. They feel they’re getting what the bride’s father paid for, whereas we’re in on the joke.

The joke depends on the life cycle of radio hits. You enjoy them when they’re new because everyone is listening to them; then in the next decade they sound unlistenably corny; and then at some point thereafter they sound great all over again because they remind you of when they were new (and you were younger). The script looks at Robbie from the second perspective, giving the movie a TV sketch premise that simultaneously evokes nostalgia and condescension and passes the blend off as "irony."

However, Sandler doesn’t limit his performance to the premise. He isn’t being ironic about what makes Robbie popular at the ordinary, lower-middle-class wedding party thrown in a rented reception hall that opens the movie. It isn’t that Robbie is particularly smooth. In this sequence Steve Buscemi as the groom’s drunken loser of a brother launches into a self-pitying and recriminating toast, and Robbie doesn’t have a practiced line to restore the tone. He fumbles until he hits on a pitch, the sincerity of which restores the mood. It’s precisely the decency of a non-pro that makes him just right for the parties he works. He asserts that the couple is no doubt as happy as he’s going to be at his imminent wedding, everyone goes, "Ahhhhhh," and it’s a party again.

The roundness of Sandler’s performance is startling because the movie’s high concept (i.e., packageable to a studio) derives from Bill Murray’s old lounge singer routine on Saturday Night Live. But Sandler as Robbie goes the other way, into unprotected simplicity. Sandler, also an SNL veteran, came out of the same school of moviemaking as Murray, though a generation later. The SNL skit-to-feature process is more rationalized now than in Murray’s heyday, but you can still say in its favor that you get the payoff of a bunch of guys making cheap movies fast. At best the movies are fresh but not refined, the ore glistening temptingly in the vein. But though I can enjoy being a joke receptacle for Mike Myers for a couple of hours, I never feel I’ve seen a classic, as I feel after even the most slapdash W.C. Fields effort. Part of the problem is that Murray’s patented insincerity was at the time a startling refusal to give us the kind of slick entertainment we were used to, but by now, when even advertisements can be ironic about the products they’re pitching 1  (and sometimes the consumers they’re pitching them to), this attitude on the part of Murray’s followers ("I’m doing this obvious stuff but I’m not ’really’--’doing’--’it’ ") is itself slick entertainment (and more profitable than ever). Another aspect of the problem is more general. The SNL actors work in sketch character, which is in some respects the opposite of star acting, since their personalities are subsumed in ticky caricature. Jerry Lewis at his jerkiest had more range than Mike Myers as Wayne or Austin Powers.

So it isn’t entirely surprising that Sandler’s forays into sketch character comedy have been frustrating. His idiomatic little character was intriguing in a small way in Mixed Nuts (1994) but his lead role in Billy Madison (1995) was so insistently drawn yet without clear outlines (is he mean to be retarded, or subversive, or hurting, or some combination?) that I found the picture unwatchable. (It’s as if Bill Murray, his puddinghead voice twisting his lips sideways like a stroke victim’s, had played the lead in Caddyshack.) When Sandler does a sketch character at feature length he comes across as trying too hard, if that charge can be leveled at a kind of comedy in which trying too hard is a minimum requirement. But comparing him as Billy Madison to Jim Carrey as Ace Ventura, most people would see that Carrey’s excess justifies itself in a character who is, whatever else you might think, imitable, whereas Sandler’s excess seems strained, undirected.

At the same time Sandler has something that Carrey has striven for in vain. Sandler was enormously appealing just playing an unassuming rocker guy in Airheads (1994). He seemed a natural in front of the camera in a way that the movie’s star, stolid Brendan Fraser, who can’t play natural or flamboyant characters, probably never will be. (Fraser turns his big, anxious-to-please clockface towards us and we can see exactly what makes him tick as a performer--nothing.) Then Sandler’s starring vehicle Happy Gilmore (1996) took fuller advantage of the way he makes unforced ease seem like the clearest route to an actor’s instincts. The problem with almost all comedians who try to "stretch" into less idiomatic acting can be seen in Carrey’s performance in The Truman Show. When Carrey can’t rely on shtick he still wants a specific reward for each scene and he wants it right away. (Think of his yearning look talking to his best friend on the pier. 2 ) By contrast, Sandler is cellularly low-keyed and it gives him the patience to relax and let the character happen. When he stops trying, his patience functions as theatrical tact and taste, which his performances in Billy Madison and The Waterboy (1998) might not suggest he possessed.

Sandler’s ability to take his time in character is not only perfect to create character in general, it is Robbie The Wedding Singer’s character. Still living with his sister, he’s the last to realize that his appealing youth has run out. He finds it out early on when his fiancée stands him up at the altar. Later that day she appears and tells him that she fell in love with him six years ago as an up and coming local rocker (who licked the mike like David Lee Roth) but that she doesn’t want to marry a wedding singer and raise his kids in Ridgefield in his sister’s basement while he works wedding parties for $60 a pop.

This crisis advances the sketch premise: we next see Robbie working a wedding party when he’s devastatingly not in the mood. By providing motivation for excess it brings out the best sketch acting that Sandler can do, when Robbie groups himself with the other unmarriageable losers in the room, whom he points out for everyone, and then says with deranged insistence, "Cindy and Scott are newlyweds--whoopee-do!" as he launches into a rendition of "Love Stinks." These first two wedding parties, one in which he has to deal with an erratic interruption and the other in which he is the erratic interruption, also throw him together with Julia (Drew Barrymore), a waitress at the reception hall, who falls for Robbie in the course of voicing her hesitation about her own upcoming wedding.

Sandler is funny off-balance, but his performance is not held together by the fact that we don’t know what to expect of him, as in the case of Jerry Lewis and Jim Carrey, but by the fact that we do. Sandler’s quiet, low-stress concentration provides continuity in the performance both before and after Robbie is stood up. You see it in the opening sequence in the slight change of tone when he teases his best friend Sammy (Allen Covert) for hitting on chicks. Then later, when a guy at a party brings up Robbie’s aborted wedding and says, "You must have felt like shit," Robbie’s response has enough of the kind of aggression that, ever since Jerry Lewis, has been a necessary component of top comedians’ character, but the sarcastically dead tone is still in low-key character.

This even tone of Sandler’s can get wacky. For instance, when Sammy says that Robbie has fallen for Julia and Robbie denies it and Sammy further tests him by calling Julia "a cool chick with a hot ass," Robbie says without inflection or punctuation: "How’s this you talk about her ass again I’ll break your neck?" Overall, Sandler gets more out of every swing in Robbie’s situation and mood by playing it mild. We don’t expect to be surprised by slow, even readings so the effect is doubly surprising. There are spectacular readings: Robbie’s quavery child’s voice when his sister tells him that his bride has disappeared leaving only a note and he says, "So it was a bad note?" (This is made all the better by too-accommodating Robbie trying to reassure first his wedding guests and then himself that everything’s okay, as if he were being paid to entertain at his own wedding.) And best of all, the adroit way Robbie gets Glenn (Matthew Glave), Julia’s philandering fiancé, to tell on himself in a nightclub. Robbie’s reassuring sameness shouldn’t disguise Sandler’s skill at adapting the varying comic demands of the scenes to his character. He’s the rare young break-out comedian for whom comic acting isn’t a stretch.

Sandler is the least pretentious, and comes across as the least driven, of ambitious big comedians working in the movies now. He doesn’t seem as if he’d ever go the way of Tom Hanks and give us a sententious retard epic like Forrest Gump. I can’t see him going after awards like Jim Carrey, either, whose muted pathos in The Truman Show is far less exhilarating and inventive than his less respectable performances, including Ace Ventura, and I’m thinking not only of something like the instant replay in super slow motion and reverse, but when he talks through his ass as well. I can see why Ace Ventura and The Mask made Carrey a star; I don’t think either The Truman Show or Man on the Moon would have. (To do Andy Kaufman justice Man on the Moon should have been a poker-faced, but openly ersatz straining-for-significance biopic, rather than the "genuine" article, and should have starred Mike Myers, who can’t compete with Carrey as an impersonator but who learned infinitely more from Kaufman.) Sandler seems to be the opposite of Jim Carrey at his best, who, like Jerry Lewis and Andy Kaufman and Bill Murray, pushes his star comedian’s drive right up to the edge of hostility. Sandler, a soft-spoken guy raised in New Hampshire, doesn’t have the intentness on getting our attention, or the vacuum-attachment need that usually accompanies it. This may be why when he plays a sketch character he drives it home so monotonously, like an Andy Kaufman routine without the wily madness. (If Kaufman’s routines hadn’t been put-ons, concepts, they’d be like Sandler’s playing in Billy Madison and The Waterboy.)

Sandler’s limitation--that his talent is not quite right for sketch comedy--is, finally, his great advantage for adult moviegoers. He can’t "think" in those boxes. He is instead a fully relaxed comic actor, which can have its own pitfalls. He "reads" as such a good guy that he can keep us adequately entertained with too little effort in Big Daddy (1999). His character’s unfussed reactions to the gay couple show that Sandler is more interested in being a nice guy host than in exploiting any and every opportunity to make his undiscerning audience laugh. In other words, he may not be demonically insatiable enough as a star comedian.

Of course, the stylistic alternation between these two distinct modes--three steps forward with The Wedding Singer, four steps back with The Waterboy, two steps forward again with the large-scaled urban adult comedy of Big Daddy--indicates that Sandler doesn’t have a sure sense of what really works for him. And just now he has the kind of give-us-anything popularity with audiences that must overwhelm an artist’s instincts. All of which is to say that I don’t know if he sees what’s special about his performance in The Wedding Singer or whether he’ll ever have the focus to replicate it. But within its terms he gives a genuinely felt performance of a kind you probably never would have expected from him (and which most critics did not perceive), turning a dodo comedy character into a complete young man, one whose likeability seems genuine rather than calculated for audience approval.

Sandler also earns points for bringing conviction to a picture that doesn’t entirely deserve it. The Wedding Singer is a skit extended to the length of a romantic comedy, and though it holds together because Sandler doesn’t play the role for quick-fix effects, it is often a dismal experience. It bumps along somewhat like Sixteen Candles, I thought, except that Sixteen Candles had twin engines in Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall, and a number of the supporting performers contributed various kinds of energy (Michael Schoeffling, Paul Dooley, John Cusack). In The Wedding Singer, Drew Barrymore has almost no material. Her role is unaccountably prim so that although she looks great (there’s a shot of her in a sea-foam green sweater in the morning sun when her skin looks like it’s made of light, not flesh) it’s a little safe and cute when she develops a crush on Sandler. Barrymore could be a confused bride-to-be believably enough, but Julia is just too nice. She helps Robbie rescue a depressed fat boy at a bar mitzvah by asking him to dance in preference to all the other boys there. Later when she encourages Robbie to sing a song he wrote, influenced by The Cure but written half before and half after he was stood up at the altar, she smiles and squints and claps her hands, practically reducing Robbie to the level of the sad fat kid. Barrymore is just there to respond to Robbie, and it leaves her looking as if she’d signed on after rehearsals were over.

Similarly, though there’s a big cast, too few of the actors have a chance to score. Matthew Glave does have a remarkable way of altering his attention from bare tolerance to sexy-piggy engagement, and Matthew Kimble as a toothless old drunk hollering out advice in a bar scene gives the movie a jolt, briefly. But there are a lot of missed opportunities: Alexis Arquette as a Boy George wannabe in Robbie’s band who enrages the party guests with serial renditions of "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" while Robbie takes his breaks, and Angela Featherstone as Robbie’s big-haired ex being the most obvious. Ellen Albertini Dow, as Rosie, a pixieish old lady who takes singing lessons from Robbie and pays him in meatballs, is really awful in a way that tells you why the movie was a hit: it allows the audience to smile at the middle-class culture of celebration that it’s ridiculing at the same time. (Dow’s rap number at her own fiftieth anniversary party is the picture’s low point.)

The problem with The Wedding Singer is that everything is pitched right at that place where the complacent, sitcom-loving, middle-class audience meets the complacent, ironic-if-irony’s-"in," younger segment of the same audience. (It’s perfect for people who think other people’s weddings are tacky but that their own was perfectly tastely.) Likewise, it makes a particularly unseemly compromise between family comedy and low comedy. It’s low humor comes out wholesome, for instance, the way the fat boy at the bar mitzvah grabs Barrymore’s butt and then everyone follows suit, children, grandparents, et al.

So it’s almost out of the blue that Sandler could be good at all. But while the movie doesn’t keep Sandler from giving a genuine performance, or the audience from enjoying it, it did hurt him with critics. Punch-Drunk Love is the Sandler movie for critics, and while you see the same acting talent approaching a similar character, you also realize that the director Paul Thomas Anderson doesn’t push the actor beyond his performance in The Wedding Singer but rather puts him in a more deliberately stylized, and in sum a more restrictive, setting. Anderson’s romance resolves the character of the basically sweet young man with unpredictable accesses of rage; in the course of the noir plot desire gives him something to fight for and control of violence makes him a man. The only mysteries in the movie have to do with certain incidentals, and come from the startling editing and suggestive music and sound design more than anything the performers might have thought to do--the ellipses feel mighty planned. Sandler can’t really get to you in Punch-Drunk Love because it’s so completely Anderson’s show. The advantage of this, if you care, is to spare you the embarrassment of saying you liked a Sandler picture.

I prefer The Wedding Singer, though in some ways it’s plainly lousy in a way the suavely crafted Punch-Drunk Love isn’t. But the division in Robbie’s character--he looks and sounds like a loser, but is angelically satisfied with his life--is free of the smarmy calculation of the rest of the movie. At a basic level you feel that Robbie doesn’t need to change; he’s perfect as a sleepy, permanently adolescent, horizontally mobile, suburban nice guy. His complacency is charming. And though you might wish for some stronger scenes when he’s jilted and his center fuel tank blows, he’s so good at being sweet that it makes sense that he doesn’t get too wild. Robbie carries on, but without his previous blissful unself-consciousness, now seeing himself at other people’s worst estimate of him. Sandler brings a rare resonance to the kind of popular comedy that reflects (for better and worse) the big, ordinary audience’s lives. Without distancing himself from the crowd-pleasing spam (as Bill Murray has done in some of his rougher movies), Sandler finds an organic character within it, and that seems like a substantial achievement to me. For which Barrymore’s glowing Julia is an appropriate reward.

1. even advertisements can be ironic: An appropriate example was offered as a link on AOL’s Home Page on 31 March 2001: a page called "Bad Hair Decade: GetMusic Picks the Worst ’Dos of the Eighties." The page featured a string of clues inviting you to guess the name of ’80s music groups and soloists. By clicking on the clue you got the answer along with a photo of the bad hair ’dos. At the bottom of the page was a link to a message board which invited you to comment on the worst rocker hair of the decade. That link was right below another one: "Click to Buy Bad Hair Music". (return to text)
2. When Carrey can’t rely on shtick: Which isn’t to say that Carrey couldn’t do high comedy. I’d rather watch him in Shaw’s Arms and the Man as Sergius, who can’t decide which aspect of six is the real Sergius, than a stage-trained comedian like Kevin Kline. (return to text)