Mr Deeds

(Steven Brill, USA, 2002)

The most risible moment in this strange film arrives when Babe (Winona Ryder) confronts her evil boss in the television industry, Mac (Jared Harris). She compares the lovable innocence of small-town guy Longfellow Deeds (Adam Sandler) to the “ironic detachment” of her urban generation.

But this loose remake of Frank Capra’s classic Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936) has some pretty ironic ways of depicting Deeds’ innocence. For starters, whenever helping out a damsel in distress or standing up for the dignity of ordinary people, Deeds becomes as violent as Rambo. He hurls trashcans, punches his foes repeatedly, and kicks them in the guts.

Being an Adam Sandler movie, the extremity of this mock violence is a prime gag. It peppers Mr Deeds like other markers of the Solid Gold Sandler sensibility. Markers like his kitschy taste for 1970s rock (his rendition of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” is especially amusing), his generosity toward other cast members (John Turturro almost steals the show), and his seeming obsession with jokes about gayness.

But is Sandler here aiming for higher, nobler things? A very appealing performer, his full potential has yet, as of 2002, to be tapped on screen. But almost nothing works in this laboured attempt to reincarnate Gary Cooper in Sandler.

Mr Deeds is an attempt at making a modern, populist comedy. But what’s missing is, precisely, the people! The film is so concentrated on the tabloid TV program which sets out to smear Deeds after he inherits a fortune, that it omits to portray the public who are presumably swayed against him.

The film also forgets to make Deeds less than perfect. Tales of power and wealth suddenly in the hands of a good man usually need to show a few moments of weakness, even potential corruption, in the hero-figure. Here, the only character who undergoes a change is Babe – and Ryder is, alas, very ill at ease as a performer in these shoes.

more Sandler: The Wedding Singer, Little Nicky

sublime Sandler: Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish

experimental Sandler: Eight Crazy Nights

more Brill: Without a Paddle

© Adrian Martin August 2002