This Week in Cinema (03.28.07)
Reign Over Me
By Beth Capper
Published: March 29th, 2007 | 4:46pm
Is it a 9/11 film? That’ll be the question on your lips while watching Reign Over Me, director Mike Binder’s heart-wrenching portrait of bereavement, which casts Adam Sandler as Charlie Fineman, an emotionally retarded widower holing up in his New York apartment after losing his family in the September 11 terrorist attacks.
It’s been four years since the tragedy, and Fineman is in deep denial, refusing to communicate with anyone and spending most days in his apartment playing video games and obsessively re-modelling his kitchen. One day he runs into estranged college roommate Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle), a successful dental surgeon who has been half-heartedly trying to get back in touch with Fineman ever since he heard about the tragedy. Johnson begins to rekindle his friendship with Fineman in an attempt to get him to open up, and in return Fineman provides him with some much-needed relief from his overbearing wife, played by the irrepressible Jada Pinkett Smith.
It’s not a 9/11 film in the same way that United 93 and World Trade Center are. Those films deal directly with the event itself, albeit with different aspects and from very disparate points of view. But Reign Over Me is a film that attempts to deal with the emotional repercussions on the lives of the victim’s families, using Fineman and his in-laws as an example. However, most of the time, it’s difficult to determine why Binder chose 9/11 as the backdrop for this narrative, considering that he seems to want to circumvent focusing on the event itself.
Instead, he utilizes it as a cultural touchstone to make his study of bereavement more universally applicable, and the only real references to the aftermath of September 11 come in the form of news bulletins relating to the subsequent “war on terror.” The film’s primary focus is on the growing relationship between Johnson and Fineman, with 9/11 set firmly on the backburner, so much so that sometimes it feels unnatural. The characters’ refusal to name the tragic event is often baffling — with Johnson describing at one point how Fineman’s family died in “a plane crash,” as though it might be any plane crash, instead of this particularly momentous one.
Reign Over Me tries to juggle too many storylines at the same time, focusing in part on the relationship between Fineman and Johnson, Johnson and his wife, and Johnson’s family and Fineman. There’s also a sexual-harassment allegation against Johnson thrown in — a narrative that the film seems to keep with for a while and then abruptly concludes.
For the most part, Binder seems too quick to give over to the kind of Hollywood stereotypes that have long been held as the ultimate ingredients for blockbuster success. There’s the nagging wife and her pussy-whipped husband (Pinkett-Smith and Cheadle), the young and ambitious lawyer out to win his case whatever the moral cost, and the kind-hearted wizened old judge. However, in Sandler’s performance there are moments where his agony is truly moving, and in these moments the gravity of 9/11 is very much present. It is only unfortunate that these are few and far between.
Issue #34
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