Grown Ups

A version of this review appeared in The Age, June 24, 2010.

From Sex And The City 2 to Shrek Forever After, Australian cinemas are currently filled with movies about the trials of getting older. But Adam Sandler is fairly happy with how his life has turned out, judging from this sunny comedy which he wrote with Fred Wolf – a kind of lowbrow version of The Big Chill (1983) about a group of childhood friends who reunite for a holiday at a lake house with their wives and families, to trade reminiscences and affectionate barbs.

Sandler rose to fame playing a passive-aggressive doofus with a mile-wide streak of ressentiment, a persona brilliantly exploited by Paul Thomas Anderson in Punch-Drunk Love (2002). But little of the old simmering rage is apparent in his portrayal of Lenny Feder – a top Hollywood agent whose professional talent for calming bruised egos not only helps him get by as a family man, but also comes in handy for smoothing out differences between his pals, played by comic standbys Kevin James, David Spade, Chris Rock, and Rob Schneider.

In other words, the film amounts to a Saturday Night Live reunion special, a prospect that may inspire more groans than excitement. Still, each member of this line-up has talent of a sort. Rock is more or less wasted, but James keeps it real with his regular-guy stoicism, Spade retains his impish way with a one-liner, and even the ever-obnoxious Schneider is more effective than usual as a humourless '70s throwback in love beads and a ludicrous quiff, the butt of perhaps three-quarters of the jokes.

The most intensely sociable of Sandler's films, Grown Ups might have been designed to debunk the myth that it's lonely at the top. Rather than trying to stem the tide of ad-libs, the director Dennis Dugan falls back on frequent interchangable reaction shots of the group convulsed with laughter. In worldly terms Lenny has been far more successful than his peers, but this never becomes a major plot point – though some kind of angst is apparent in a peculiar running gag about the family nanny (Di Quon), who is obliged to masquerade as an au pair.

Other anxieties surface too, most of them connected with women. We're invited to be grossed out when Schneider's character makes goo-goo eyes at his much older wife (Joyce van Patten), or when an over-zealous mother (Maria Bello) insists on breast-feeding her four-year-old son. While none of this is exactly ill-natured, it's hard to forgive the filmmakers for their constant gibes at the elderly, the homely, and anyone else who qualifies as a loser. Luckily, in this movie, winning isn't difficult: you just have to be one of Sandler's friends.