September: the time of the season for mourning. Now more than ever, as September has rolled around again. A month of reflection for 21st-century New Yorkers, and Americans in general, still wrapping their minds around what happened that fateful day.
With each major tragedy that occurs in the modern world, it doesn’t take pundits long to express their fear at how quickly Hollywood will seek to translate an unfortunate reality to the big screen – risking the likely accusations of exploitation to come.
In 2007, Reign Over Me found the perfect middle ground between the previous year’s too-soon World Trade Center and too-real United 93. Though not explicitly about the September 11th attacks, writer-director Mike Binder’s character-driven dramedy encapsulates the wounded heartbeat of a still-healing city, nation and globe alike.
In the film, a frustrated, married-with-two-children NYC dentist (Don Cheadle) whom most would consider repressed, learns to live again via a chance run-in and subsequent reconnection with his worse-off college roommate (Adam Sandler). The latter, sporting a messy, Bob Dylan-evoking hairdo running counter to his typical screen persona, is an utter shell of the man the former once knew.
Sandler’s Charlie Fineman has been a scooter-riding Manhattan wanderer since losing his wife and three young daughters – aboard the flight from Boston to Los Angeles – in the attacks. He’s checked out, relying on hard-drumming and an obsessive-compulsive commitment to the video game Shadow of the Colossus not to deny, but to unconsciously confront the magnitude of what he’s lost instead.
It’s not until taking Cheadle’s Alan Johnson under his middle-of-the-night, Mel Brooks movie marathon-loving wing that Charlie begins to suffer the consequences of his allotment. He’s a man, as Alan would tell his wife, Janeane (Jada Pinkett Smith), “lost in Charlie World” – a reality-indifferent ticking clock that would quicker scream out the pain before keeping still long enough to talk it out.
Until he does.
No one is fixed overnight, Reign Over Me contends. Exuded: a hard-fought confidence in purporting the formula for forgetting, which is to not forget at all. It’s to have faith that they who more than demonstrated the capability of listening – whether it be a family member, friend, co-worker or professional, like the therapist Liv Tyler plays in the film – will still be there to pick you up on bad days. Because it’s they who also reminded you, based on standing by your side during moments of tremendous progress, that good days – and plenty of them – can be had again. Even in the absence of those lost, because they too continue to give you the strength to carry on. Even in death.
Do not let the loaded material deter you from viewing. Think of Reign Over Me as being in the mold of Adam Sandler’s more mature comedies: an on-brand, laugh-out-loud outing also rife with gut-punching tonal shifts. Though, unlike 2006’s Click, no It’s a Wonderful Life!-adjacent reversion back to square one can save Charlie Fineman here. Reign Over Me calls for Sandler to channel his understatedly impressive vulnerability, then dial it up to the highest degree, to get his most broken movie alter ego just right. As Charlie, he seeks redemption through recognition, rather than erasure.
Every so often, the funnyman grabs hold of the darkness on a victory path laid with the collective stun of his vast assemblage of detractors. In doing so, he proves to all those reluctant about watching Reign Over Me — currently streaming on Hulu — that when he’s got something even his foremost critics are intrigued to hear him say, you best listen. You can do it.
