Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
100 to 86? Hahahahahaha... pardon me. I really shouldn't.... HAHAHAHAHAHA... okay. I'm better. Really. It's not even funny. I don't know why I'm laughing. I mean, the Lakers reamed them but... HAHAHAHAHA...
Okay, seriously. I'm better. No fooling. I'm just feeling like a bit of a thug right now after having spent the afternoon watching Game 4 of the NBA Finals and reading the script for Adam Sandler's new film DEEDS. This isn't the Paul Thomas Anderson film, keep in mind. That one's still successfully under wraps. No, this is the movie he's actually shooting at the moment, his next real "Adam Sandler" movie.
He's got a franchise going right now that's as particular as the James Bond films or the HALLOWEEN movies. In order for it to be a "real" Adam Sandler film, Tim Herlihy has to write it. Fans of these films expect Sandler to play Sandler, and there's a couple of different incarnations of that. I'd say the most successful version of Sandler so far, and the funniest, were in THE WEDDING SINGER and HAPPY GILMORE. If you agree with that assessment, get ready to rejoice, because DEEDS reads like a successful merging of those two films, and it's actually very funny on the page.
The January 23, 2001 revision of DEEDS by Tim Herlihy & Steven Brill is a nice change of pace following LITTLE NICKY, also co-written by these two. FOr one thing, it's pretty hard to screw up the basic story of MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN, the 1936 comedy gem written by the great Robert Riskin and directed by Frank Capra. It's an optimistic, big-hearted movie with a great performance by Gary Cooper opposite the equally great Jean Arthur. Have I mentioned it's great? It's been remade once officially as a Monte Markham TV series in the late '60s, and once unofficially as the Coens candy-coated Frank Lloyd Wright love letter THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, and Sandler's version is playing down its identity as a "remake," even though the fact that it's hung on a classic structure is one of its strengths.
Basically, every version of DEEDS is the story of a naive innocent who comes to the big city and, though circumstance, is put in a position of great authority, only to be betrayed by the media which paints his decency as a deficiency, making him out to be a jackass. In the end, the woman who set him up for the ridicule falls in love with him and they save his name and the business and fall in love. Simple stuff, and it's in the variations that the different versions distinguish themselves. Capra's film is vintage Capra fare, with a sweet surface hiding a knowing dissection of the cynicism of the media. HUDSUCKER is silly, but knowingly silly, and its leaps of logic into fairy tale territory are the closest the Coens come to lowbrow.
In Sandler's new take, he plays Longfellow Deeds, a small town pizza parlor owner who also writes and sells greeting card poetry on the side. He's ridiculously well-adjusted, a normal guy who should provide a nice role for Sandler away from the feeble-minded moron comedy of THE WATERBOY and LITTLE NICKY. I never like him in those roles. It's too annoying for the full length of a film. This is Sandler the way he really seems to be. He's a key member of the community of Mandrake Falls, and he's perfectly happy with his life.
In fact, when Peter Blake dies, Deeds doesn't have any reason to even care. He doesn't know Blake is his long lost great uncle. In fact, no one knows at first. Chuck Cedar (Peter Gallagher) is Blake's second in command at the giant media conglomerate that Blake built, and he is the bad guy of the film. He's the one who goes and finds Deeds, the only living heir to the Blake fortune, and brings him to New York in an effort to quickly gain control of the $40 billion estate Deeds inherits. Cobb and Anderson are Cedar's lackeys, and I think these are the roles being played by Peter Dante and Allen Covert, Sandler's longtime friends and costars. I know Steve Buscemi and Jared Harris are also both in the film, and there are a number of supporting roles they'd be right for. When they all converge on Mandrake Falls to introduce themselves to Deeds, he is totally unimpressed by them or their money. He only agrees to go because he learns that Blake was family, and he considers it the right thing to do. At no point does the $40 billion even interest him.
One of the things that made me laugh hardest in HAPPY GILMORE was when Happy would just beat the shit out of someone. I'll admit it. I'm a sucker for thug comedy. SLAP SHOT hits me in the same happy place, and so does JACKASS on MTV. There's plenty of it in DEEDS, as he's really polite until someone crosses the line, at which point he's more than happy to hand them a beat down. Even on the page, it makes me laugh, so I imagine it'll work just fine in the theater. Sandler does this stuff well.
As in both MR. DEEDS and HUDSUCKER, it's a female reporter who brings the blessed idiot down. This time, it's Babe Bennett (Winona Ryder), a segment producer for INSIDE ACCESS, a sleazy tabloid show. Her producer Mac McGrath (John Turturro) is about to renegotiate Babe's contract, and she's been coasting on fumes for a while. She has no choice but to go for the jugular with Deeds, and he gives her plenty of ammo to use against him. There's a drunken night out with Keith Richards that will be hysterical if they actually get Richards to shoot his part. Deeds is so matter of fact about his decency that Babe is sure it's an act. She poses as "Pam Dawson," a school nurse from Winchesterfield, OH, a town name she makes up on the spur of the moment. The web of lies she spins about her childhood comes back to haunt her in a very funny scene when Deeds takes her home to Winchesterfield, OH, for a surprise on one of their dates. In spite of herself, Babe finds that she is drawn to Deeds, and that she believes him. It's a solid comic role for Ryder, who needs to reconnect with the audience right now. It's been too long since we were allowed to like her on film. LOST SOULS and GIRL INTERRUPTED are both so grim, so stolid, that it feels like it's been forever since Ryder smiled on film. One of the reasons for THE WEDDING SINGER's success was the enormous charm that Drew Barrymore projected, and Sandler needs Winona to deliver the same kind of appeal here for this film to work.
I am dying to know if they shot the sequences with the actor indicated in the script as Peter Blake, the great-uncle whose freezing death while climbing Mount Everest kicks everything into motion. If so, I hope they keep it and use it. It would be a really cool (pun intended) last appearance by the now-deceased legend, especially if they go through with the plan of using his son to play him in flashbacks as a younger man. If they didn't have a chance to shoot the scenes, good luck finding someone who will pay off with the same comic impact. Since I'm not going to name the actor indicated in the script, feel free to guess below. I want to keep it a secret for now, since they haven't announced anything in the press about his involvement, and they may be trying to preserve some element of surprise.
In the end, I'd have to say this is one I'm looking forward to now. It's not going to supplant the original, and I don't think they're trying to. Instead, it gives Adam Sandler something timeless to hang his very modern sensibilites on, and it should be a confident comic romp that allows him to further hone the formula that's been so successful in the past. And when something works as well as this formula has (for the most part), minor fine-tuning may be the most we can ask.
"Moriarty" out.
