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Features
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Sandler's Second Segue Way
Following the dramatic departure Punch-Drunk Love, funnyman Adam Sandler continues his pursuit of Jim Carrey-Robin Wlliams territory with the bittersweet James L. Brooks offering Spanglish.
Thursday, December 16, 2004
By Todd Gilchrist
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Lester Cohen/Wireimage.com
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Brooks' latest couple
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It is an age old Hollywood cliché: deep down, great comedians, from Charlie Chaplin to Jerry Lewis to Robin Williams, are also serious fellows, who eventually cannot help but want to put up something other than a happy face on the big screen.
The same goes for many of Saturday Night Live’s most successful alumni, from Dan Aykroyd to Bill Murray to Steve Martin. In the case of Adam Sandler, he appears to be pursuing this well-trodden path by working with top-flight directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson (Punch-Drunk Love) and now James L. Brooks, the masterful purveyor of big screen entertainment such as Broadcast News and Terms of Endearment. But the actor insists appearances can be deceiving.
“I’m not looking to get away from anything,” Sandler says during a recent press conference during which he tried to make it absolutely clear that his hammier days are not yet behind him. “I like what I’ve done, I enjoy working with my friends, and I love those movies.”
“But Jim Brooks, when I met him a long time ago, just a quick hello kind of thing, I’ve loved his movies, everyone he’s done,” he continues. “So the fact that he wrote a movie and wanted me to be in it, I was extremely excited. But in my head, I didn’t say, ‘I’m gonna run away from my other stuff.’ I was just like yeah, I’d love to do that, too.”
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Writer-director Brooks
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In the film, Sandler plays John Clasky, a four-star chef who is able to manage a kitchen but not the separate demands of his household clean. His wife Deborah (Téa Leoni, in the first of several new high-profile roles) is an irrepressible overachiever with too little to do; his mother-in-law Evelyn (Cloris Leachman) is a recovering alcoholic, if only she would stop drinking; and his daughter Bernice (Sarah Steele) is fraught with insecurities projected upon her by mom Deborah.
Sandler, as is typical with the way he approaches most things in life, has a pretty straightforward view of his latest character. “I think Clasky just wants his family to make it, and he wants everybody to live in a house where you’re not walking on egg shells. To lose it and snap and make people uncomfortable in the house would only add to that. So I think that he’s just using his brain.”
And again, Sandler is adamant that he is not on some sort of career strategy path to become known as a Happy Gilmore gone sad. “When Jim offered this to me, I didn’t say, ‘Ooh, this would go perfectly with what I’m looking to do’ and just imagine looking back at my career in a year to say this happened,” he says. “[But] looking back at my career, when I end up having kids and I say, ‘Throw in that Spanglish, let’s take a look at that,’ I know I’m gonna be very proud.”
At that time, perhaps Grandpa Sandler will reserve his most fond memories for the scenes that really required him to use a different set of acting muscles than those, say, needed to clock Bob Barker. For example, the sequence where Leoni’s character makes a cathartic confession to her husband.
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Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
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Oscar-bound Leachman
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“Before we started rolling and shooting, I was in another part of the house and I was getting ready for it hours at a time, trying to just be in that scene as much as I could,” he recalls. “Because when I read the scene for the first time, I said that’s the most original take I’ve ever seen on a confession scene, on an infidelity scene, the fact that my character is not enraged.”
“I’m sure if I was writing the movie, I would’ve snapped,” he continues. “But this was just incredibly real. And as an actor, that’s how I tried to play it.”
There is a tremendous amount of early buzz surrounding the performance of Cloris Leachman as Deb’s alcoholic mom, with many suggesting she is a lock for a Best Supporting Actress nomination. Unsurprisingly, the sweet-natured Sandler has nothing but good things to say about her and his other female co-stars.
“I like hanging out with them,” he reveals. “I love seeing them on the set. Just good people. Cloris, you know, what can you say? Just incredibly funny and alive. I like Deborah, Téa’s character, [and] we had a back story. We were in love since we were young, and we fell in love for a reason.”
“We connected, and we happened to be at a place right now where Téa’s character is just off, and my character wants to get her back on track,” says Sandler of the actress, who stole the show from Al Pacino in the little seen People I Know. “She’s a strong, smart woman who’s just not feeling right now. I’ve seen people go through this, I think that she’s just looking for answers.”
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Steve Granitz/Wiremage.com
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Agent of change Paz Vega
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Explaining the dysfunctional dynamic that becomes further exacerbated when Deborah hires and attractive maid named Flor (Paz Vega) to keep house, Sandler continues. “[Deborah’s] mother and Flor and her children, that’s what great about the script. Everybody’s characters are affecting everyone else’s characters and learning about themselves.”
Even though Spanglish presents some challenges for the average popcorn-munching moviegoer, it stands the greatest chance of winning Sandler real widespread critical acclaim. But unlike his character’s hand-wringing over an enormously positive review, the actor says he never feared for either success or failure as he ascended the ranks of Hollywood’s elite.
“To be honest with you, when I got into this, I never thought about reviews,” he says. “I never thought about what people would say about me; I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do. The fact that my character is that aware of the consequences, I think that’s pretty amazing. I wasn’t like that in real life, no.”
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Steve Graitz/Wireimage.com
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Co-star Sarah Steele
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What’s more, despite his enormous box office success, Sandler makes no claims on knowing what audiences want from their entertainment. “I don’t know any formulas, but I do know that I don’t know,” he chuckles. “I gotta say, when I first saw Spanglish, I had no idea the audience was going to laugh as much as they did. I read the script and I laughed, but I didn’t know it was this funny and I didn’t know it was gonna be such an experience for an audience to be kind of a roller coaster, laughing and emotional.”
“I can’t tell you what works and doesn’t work, but it’s nice to see a crowd of people having an experience like that.”
No matter what happens next for the actor with his remake of The Longest Yard and other the Revolution Studios project Click, he admits he’s thoroughly enjoying learning new lessons with each new film that comes his way. “I did, on this movie, learn the most I’ve ever learned about making a movie, from Jim,” he states. “I always thought I worked hard and my friends worked hard, but I’ve never seen anybody like Jim go from start to finish.”
“Before we started shooting, it was the most amount of work I ever did in pre-production, just establishing relationships and rehearsing and just becoming comfortable with each other,” he adds. “I’ve never seen anybody with that much discipline. So I’ve learned that I’m not as hard-working as I thought I was.”
Ultimately, seeing others who commit themselves to their film work with complete abandon is likely to stay with Sandler well beyond the span of his latest release. “I just hate to say it, but this movie was written and directed so well that I did what the man told me to do. [But] how am I going to apply it to my own movies? I guess I’ll try even harder. That’s what I’ll take from it.”
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