For me, the new Sandler/Barrymore movie 50 First Dates was never going to be anything more than a casual renter: the kind of film you skip until it comes out on video (and even then only worth the money if there’s nothing better on the ‘new releases’ shelf). The main question yesterday was whether the movie itself would amount to anything more than a clothes-line on which to pin the handful of funny gags from the trailer.
As it turned out, the story was flimsy, the acting patchy, but the overall effect vaguely pleasing in an absent-minded sort of way. Except to say that I found it disquieting to be presented, once more, with a Sandler vehicle that is so feverishly demarcated in terms of gender and sexuality. Fine that the central characters are unequivocally straight and conventionally attractive (i.e. young, slim, white, able-bodied). But why does the supporting cast have to be so negatively contrived? Is the status of heterosexual screen romance so fragile an institution that it needs to be shored up at every turn by the repeated derision of older women, fat women, gay men, aboriginal people, transgendered people?
And silly me for not figuring out in advance that the two most derided characters – the gay-coded bodybuilder and the campy Teuton of indeterminate gender (how funny!) – would end up as a couple. So, despite Drew’s crippling memory loss, Adam establishes (and re-establishes on a daily basis) the Nuclear Family via a daily dose of video diaries, while the rest of the cast recedes into irrelevance, and the two queers effectively cancel themselves out.
As Drew says on the official website for 50 First Dates, “Adam’s films are like a beautiful medicine”. Indeed.
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I watched that film on the plane about a week ago. This morning I was listening to Pet Sounds on the way to work… and all I could think of was Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore singing it. Suffice to say I can’t listen to it anymore.
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