ANGER MANAGEMENT

Rating: 3

With ANGER MANAGEMENT, Adam Sandler continues those first few tentative steps he took with Paul Thomas Anderson’s PUNCH DRUNK LOVE towards appealing to an audience over the age of eight and other than male. There it was a stab at dramatic respectability that worked beyond anyone’s expectations. Here he’s made the bold choice of moving from his obsession with gross-out humor to something that sometimes actually smacks of wit. No, really. Now, I’m not talking about the aetherial realms of Noel Coward or even the Marx Brothers, but there is a maturity here that is reaching for more than the scatological and no one is more surprised that yours truly.
Our boy Adam plays Dave Buznik, a 35-year-old, browbeaten executive assistant who’s been bullied so much that he beats the bullies, and everyone else for that matter, to the punch when it comes to knocking him down literally or metaphorically, much to the chagrin of his honey of a girlfriend, Marisa Tomei. Dave takes it all with a sweet smile and gets on with his next humiliation with the good grace born of self-esteem so low that it doesn’t even register as a blip on the radar. Until, that is, a fateful plane trip where his self-effacing nature doesn’t so much defuse the situation as exacerbate it. Before he knows it, he’s been tasered, arrested, and sentenced to anger management classes with unconventional therapist Buddy Rydell, who just happens to be the eccentric guy who was sitting next to him on the plane. Yes, it’s all a little pat, but the point of this film is not to make sense, it’s to make us laugh and by gosh, it does just that.
A big part of this may be due to the script, it wasn’t written by Sandler, though there are one or two fart jokes that have his fingerprints all over them. You can’t expect a boy to go cold turkey with the bodily function humor, I guess. Another reason could be the director, it wasn’t Sandler, hence no mugging and the only overacting to be found is that of John Turturro as a member of Buddy’s anger management group that also includes, among others, adult film stars with a unique set of intimacy issues. Turturro’s character, who boils over with little more provocation than being awake, is soon assigned to be Dave’s anger partner, which lands him in a bar fight with a blind guy and back in front of the same judge who first assigned him to anger management. Dave’s now sentenced not just to anger management classes, but to have Buddy live with him 24/7 until this anger thing is licked and if it isn’t, Dave is looking at serious jail time. 
Nicholson isn’t breaking any new ground here as Buddy, but he does crazed with a self-satisfied panache that is just what the part calls for. Hence, it isn’t long before Jack is twitching those Mephistophelean eyebrows and leering like the dark prince himself as Buddy pushes, prods, and otherwise terrorizes Dave with a therapy that asks the question “Just who is the one in need of therapy here?”. Things like making Dave stop his car in the middle of rush hour traffic and sing “I Feel Pretty” from “West Side Story” as fellow commuters tell him to burn in hell? Or confront his childhood bully, now a serene Buddhist monk (the ubiquitous John C. Reilly in bald cap and saffron robes), and then goad him into opening a can of whoop-ass on him? And while we’re asking questions, why are there so many cameos? Bobby Knight was cutesy, John McEnroe almost de rigeur, considering the theme, but there’s something just not right about getting Robert Merrill involved.
Through it all, Nicholson’s patented evil grin and Sandler’s innocent, defenseless despair that turns to a slow burn are an irresistible combination, not just for the laughs, but for that wicked little place in all of us that wants Buddy to push Dave into growing a backbone and then into to opening his very own can of whoop-ass on the world. This is why even though not every joke lands squarely on the funny bone, Heather Graham speed-eating chocolate cupcakes falls flat, there are enough of them, like the peculiar little subplot involving a tubby cat whose wardrobe Dave is assigned to design, that do and that make us want to keep rooting for this oddly endearing couple.