Adam Sandler’s comedies are not “dumb fun,” maybe that’s why they’re not in critics’ favor. Sandler’s hilarious new film Jack and Jill brings to mind the great line that Ernst Lubitsch’s classic 1946 female plumber comedy Cluny Brown “upset people who didn‘t like to admit they have plumbing.”
In Jack and Jill, Sandler looks at sibling rivalry without that acrid love of dysfunction so popular on TV and Broadway. It’s obvious that Los Angeles ad exec Jack and his hefty, homely, still unmarried sister Jill who visits from New York will mend their rift but the fun is in watching the healing process. The film’s comedy (as in coach potato behavior) shows the depths of kinship–similarities siblings can’t help sharing but learn to accept in themselves. And Sandler’s always protective–as when Jack insults Jill but warns “I can say that because I’m her twin.”
Jack and Jill reveals that Sandler’s best comedies (Grown Ups, Bedtime Stories, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and the great Spanglish) are really love stories. He explores affection without the class and gender guilt Judd Apatow hides behind (the distraction scuttled Apatow’s grandiose Funny People). Sandler’s willingness to appear “dumb” is what makes his films so cathartic. He thrives on being unembarrassed–the key to classic comedy going back to the Greeks.
Sandler, of course, always goes back to Jewishness. He may be the least ethnically abashed Jewish film comic outside the Borscht Belt which is Jack and Jill’s natural strength. Jack’s self-consciousness about Jill is rooted in Jewish comics’ proverbial self-deprecation (that’s why the twinship premise). Jill’s large features, gaucheness, petulance and unsophisticated ways are not anti-Jewish traits but the qualities that insecure, social-climbing ethnic groups usually evade.
