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 dam Sandler has jowls. Not floppy, bulldog jowls but a middle-aged waddle, and during the scenes in Spanglish in which he offers his heartfelt, sensitive-man meanderings, it's hard to take your eyes off them. The king of frat-boy comedy, the goof who gave us "The Hanukah Song," the actor with a film oeuvre as sophisticated as a fart joke — he has jowls. It's a little disconcerting, like seeing the high-school quarterback twenty years down the road, soft and mediocre, and realizing that life was (finally) unfair to him, that his adolescent winning streak didn't last forever. You might feel a little bit bad for him — but you also feel great.And yet, that's also what you could call Adam Sandler's acting career these days: great. His performance in James L. Brooks' Spanglish is the highlight of the film, a miscalculated but affecting movie in need of better editing. Sandler plays a successful chef struggling to keep his privileged family on an even keel. He is the heart of the film, the flawed but decent man caught between his shrill, narcissist wife (Tea Leoni) and voluptuous, martyr-saint housekeeper (Paz Vega). Brooks' early film work hit the sweet spot between darkness and light, generosity and a good ol' mean streak (Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News), but lately he's been veering into treacle. As Good As It Gets could have been, quite frankly, much better, and the same can be said for Spanglish. Still, Brooks writes sharper dialogue than almost any screenwriter working today, continuing an old-school Hollywood tradition in which characters are far more clever than they should be. He blesses Sandler with classic moments of epiphany and release. When his wretched wife confesses a betrayal, Sandler swallows the emotion, letting it flicker on his dumbstruck face. Then he says something like, "I couldn't hear what you were saying. The earth just cracked open." Brooks obviously loves Adam Sandler, not just as an actor but as a person. "It's a long conversation what a good guy Adam is," he recently told The New York Times. Personally, I didn't think Sandler was a bad guy; I just didn't expect much from him. He built his career on consistently lowering the bar, tumbling from a so-so stint on Saturday Night Live into a morass of dopey-cute films that went perfectly with buffalo wings and weed. Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore (essentially the same film), The Waterboy and Little Nicky. The movies were so underwhelming that they flew right under the pop-culture radar while steadily garnering a huge male audience. Suddenly, Adam Sandler was a huge star, and none of his critics could explain it. It was like seeing three-quarters of a U.S. map turn inexplicably red. But diehards were charmed by his ineptitude, his silly voices, his punchline-less punchlines. "So hot-t-t!" he sang about his love interest in Billy Madison. "Want to touch the hiney!" That's what Adam Sandler had to offer: jokes so charmingly unsophisticated that he seemed like one of the guys — the guys women like me avoided. Then came 2002's Punch-Drunk Love. Director Paul Thomas Anderson has made a hobby of imaginative casting, revitalizing the careers of Mark Wahlberg and Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights, pitting Tom Cruise against type in Magnolia. He also loves to work with average-looking men, the kind usually swept to the side: John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Philip Baker Hall. In Sandler, Anderson found a confluence of the two; Sandler's performance as head-over-heels bathroom-supplies wholesaler Barry Egan not only turned the spotlight on a schlubby everyman but it was also a brilliant bit of contrarian casting. Adam Sandler had been in over a dozen films, but he had never acted. His was not a craft but more generic monkey's play, like some Ritalin case desperate to keep your attention. Finally, with Punch-Drunk Love, Sandler settled into a role. And he was fantastic. To understand better why Anderson turned to Sandler (not to mention the other prince-toads in his repertory group), it might be a good time to examine the sore lack of average-looking leading men in Hollywood. A short list of A-list celebrities, the kind that can open and anchor a movie, might include Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Jude Law, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Tom Hanks. And yet, how many of them could you imagine in your supermarket, buying tampons for his wife? How many of them have toe jam and pot bellies? How many of them even have chest hair? Only Hanks has maintained an aura of everyman. (And who has the most Oscar nominations? These things are not necessarily unrelated.) Hollywood has always prostrated itself at the altar of beauty, but this is getting ridiculous. Even doofy Nicolas Cage has, over the last decade, been reanimated by personal trainers and Atkins. His performance in Leaving Las Vegas was an unforgettable portrayal of conventional life set aflame, but now he doesn't seem conventional at all. Honestly, he seems a little un-human. So if you're a filmmaker these days, looking to share authentic truths about real human experience, you probably want to avoid the marquee list. If you're Wes Anderson or Sofia Coppola, you might approach Bill Murray. And if you're Paul Thomas Anderson (or James L. Brooks), you might approach Adam Sandler. Like Murray, Sandler has a knack for light moments tinged with sadness, as if all that bratty sarcasm has been stripped away by years of disappointment and regret. And, most importantly, since both men began as comedians, no one gives two shits about their appearance. In fact, we prefer our funnymen unseemly: fat and balding, gap-toothed and nerdy. The uglier they are, the better. Sandler is cursed with bad hair, a hangdog face and a bit of a schnozz, and yet, The Waterboy raked in over $150 million at the box office. James L. Brooks may love Adam Sandler's soul, but to the suits at Columbia Pictures, dude's got bank. And so Adam Sandler graduates to Hollywood's next level. He is now a respectable actor. Perhaps one day, he'll even win an Oscar in some Alexander Payne film or David Gordon Green epic. Then again, maybe he'll fall victim to his own fawning press, belly-flopping into manipulative, tear-jerking pap (see Kevin Spacey, Robin Williams). With this new mantle of gravitas, it's hard to say where Adam Sandler could go. I bet you one thing, though: I bet he still likes a good fart joke. n°
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