The new film "Reign Over Me" reminds me of a black and white kaleidoscope.
There's a lot going on, a lot of interlocking pieces shifting and morphing into each other in the hopes of demonstrating something fantastic and new.
But it ends up being kind of blah.
Maybe that's the point, though. A story about an off-kilter Sept. 11 widower and his encounters with an old college roommate isn't supposed to be a basket of puppies.
And yet, even from a post-9/11 perspective, Mike Binder's latest work struggles to establish a colorful depiction of grief and loss in an age in which families are still coping with memories they'd rather forget.
Don Cheadle plays Dr. Alan Johnson, a successful yet cautious dentist who happens upon his old college roommate, Charlie Fineman (played by Adam Sandler), a stuttering, long-haired video game junkie who hardly resembles his past self, mentally shattered by the trauma of losing his wife and daughters in the Sept. 11 attacks.
The first time we see Charlie, he's riding a scooter through New York City like a lost cat wandering the streets, dirtied from the elements and easily spooked by strangers.
His erratic, soft-spoken style of speech hints at a devastating past and an inability to comprehend the future, but the movie tells us early on the reason for Charlie's current status, so there's no dramatic surprise waiting in the wings.
The film is about how we react to tragedy, not how it thrusts itself upon us.
The two long-lost friends begin to rekindle their relationship, often involving trips to New York's ground-level record shops, all night video game binges and awkward social interactions.
Charlie is an off-balance individual. One minute he and Alan resemble a pair of raunchy college boys basking in an old friendship. But once Alan attempts to breach the topic of Charlie's past, Charlie turns into his own version of Mr. Hyde, screaming incoherently and violently destroying property.
I've been a big believer in Sandler's dramatic acting abilities since the fantastic "Punch Drunk Love." He just barely succeeds here as the unstable protagonist, making Charlie both unpredictable and likeable.
The character itself is also well written. Retaining specific scraps of memory about his family, Charlie is stuck in the past and a stranger to the present, unable (or unwilling) to escape his own fortress of solitude.
I actually really liked the analogy drawn in the film between his continual remodeling of his kitchen (as soon as he finishes, he starts all over again) and his refusal to address his situation. It sums up his life well: constant change, no resolution. Like a kaleidoscope.
But aside from some nice characterization and surface-level dramatics, "Reign Over Me" doesn't really have anywhere to go.
Cheadle's character, who suffers when not directly interacting with Charlie, gets bogged down in a few meandering subplots that end up distracting from the emotion of the story rather than supplementing it.
One in particular, in which a beautiful female patient attempts to seduce Alan as a means to forget her own husband's infidelity, too obviously mirrors Charlie's own refusal to confront his memories; I scoffed when she becomes a possible love interest for Charlie by the film's end.
Alan works hard to convince his friend to open up about his memories, but the second Charlie momentarily lets off some emotional steam in the presumably climactic scene, the filmmakers launch into an unnecessary courtroom sequence in which Charlie's sanity is evaluated.
Why? Is it not enough that a man with a personal problem fights to overcome it? Do we need the judicial system at large to throw its obtrusive hat into the ring?
Binder, whose last film was the mediocre "The Upside of Anger," seems to prefer stories set around characters struggling to move on from traumatic experiences. However, he doesn't know how to wrap up the various narrative threads intertwined in this film's final third, making it linger well past its welcome. The movie turns into a yawn.
I wanted to like this film.
Part of me still wants to like it. I think it's important to examine post-9/11 dynamics of coping. But just as Charlie's character eventually comes to realize, we can't hide from our true emotions. We must let the light in and take the bad with the good.
