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seriousficI know a lot of critics are dismissing Jack & Jill, the new Adam Sandler movie in which he plays the eponymous roles. And it's easy to look at the horrible trailer, the cookie-cutter title, the parade of familiar Sandler supporting cast members, and assume it's going to be another Grown-Ups. I don't think that's fair to the movie, though, as the entire trailer is made up of about the first thirty minutes of a two-hour movie. The rest of which... well, as the marketing obviously doesn't want to give up the twist, I probably shouldn't either, but I feel I can't discuss J&J in feminist terms without getting into what happens at the thirty-minute mark. So, spoiler warning, but if you're thinking of seeing the movie, or worse yet, thinking of not seeing the movie, I urge you to at least hear me out.
So the plot at first seems exactly like you'd expect. Adam Sandler plays Jack Sadelstein, a successful ad exec and family man (in a bitter bit of foreshadowing, we first see him telling his assistant to "sex up" a proposed ad campaign before going to pick up his son from soccer practice). He also plays Jill Sadelstein, Jack's twin sister, a granola-crunching hippie who is slowly selling out/growing up. Jill drives Jack nuts with her neediness and attention whoring, even making him take her along to his beloved Knicks game. There, they run into Al Pacino, who wants to take Jill out.
Pacino is the first off-kilter element in this movie. After a quick glimpse at the basketball game, he recedes into the background, reemerging for an awkward phone call, Jill calling him, Jack listening in on speaker phone. He talks in a subdued way, but that's almost zealous in that weariness, as if it's a part that he relishes getting to play. In a moment that could come from any Sandler movie, Jack jokes an uncomfortable Jill into going out with Pacino, hoping that he can eventually use Pacino in an ad campaign.
Jill goes to Pacino's mansion and you can hear the movie shift gears like an old car. The camera is handheld, the lighting seems too bright, and the scenery itself is off-putting--Pacino lives in a pit of obscenely artistic pornographic prints, which he never comments on even as Jill can't look away, "comedically" stuttering.
What follows is I think one of the most harrowing sequences ever put to film. For ten minutes, in what is seemingly one shot even though I'm sure there were cuts, Jill slowly comes to realize that Al Pacino is going to rape her. At first, you're kinda groaning, thinking "really, movie, you're going to make jokes about a skeevy Al Pacino?" as Jill makes wacky excuses to leave and Pacino coolly shoots them down. The audience I was with was giving it big laughs, but they died down as the scene dragged--shambled--on, with Jill becoming increasingly flustered and uncomfortable, and the movie putting no more jokes in her mouth, funny or otherwise. Finally, she outright says she's uncomfortable and wants to leave and Pacino, a vein bulging in his forehead, tells her she can't.
Things escalate to him calling her a whore and a cunt, Jill slaps him, and almost as an afterthought to the whole sequence, Pacino brutally beats and rapes her. I hate to say this, because I know it'll come off as cold, but the scene is pure cinema in his viscera. A lot of movies, when they portray rape, do so to show how evil the villain is or at least to move the plot forward. Jack & Jill seems like it's trying to replicate the anxiety and horror of being raped in cinematic form, hence the sequence playing out in real-time, no edits, no music.
The genius of this movie sets in with the context. By having Jill played by a man, it takes away the 'routine' nature of a woman being raped, but by not having Adam Sandler play a man, it also doesn't play male rape for laughs or as "worse" than female rape. And with Al Pacino playing himself, you also can't think of it as actors playing a part. It's an incredible directorial choice that strips away all the societal bullshit and shows you the crime itself, as Al Pacino strips away Sandler's dignity and power minute by minute. Pacino slowly escalates to the famous ranting we're used to from him, but in this context, you can only see it as pure misogyny instead of overacting or shtick. He just never lets you forget that he's playing himself, an amazingly brave choice. "I learned this on the set of Cruising!" he bellows at one point, preparing to sodomize Jill.
After that, the movie eschews the traditional narrative structure, especially the cliched third act of unearned sentimentality, for something I can best categorize as a spiral. A downward one. After confiding in Jack, Jill tries to report the rape, but is browbeat by the investigating officer (David Spade), who says "Cut the bullshit" enough to be a catchphrase. Pacino isn't arrested for the assault.
From there, executive producer Darren Aronofsky plays with Sandler's usual angry man-child persona, filling it with impotent rage and regret. He blames himself for what happened to Jill, as shown in a heartbreaking scene in which his daughter wanders off to pet a dog being taken for a walk, only for Jack to chase off the dog-walker in a hail of profanity and break down in tears. He goes to a law firm to see if he can file suit against Pacino, but the attorney (Norm MacDonald) lays out for five minutes the impossibilities of prosecuting sexual assault in America. It's not as visceral as the rape scene, but it's much more frightening.
Now, this is a very dark movie, but I feel the writers do a great job of almost teasing you with hope and lightness so it doesn't become unbearable. At one point, Jack finds some porn under his son's bed. In a funny little scene, he's clearly more reminiscient than angry, fondly paging through the latest edition of Playboy and checking to make sure the stash isn't big enough to make his kid a pervert (as he was discussing earlier in a scene with Nick Swardson, who plays Jack's co-worker). Then, at the bottom of the stack, he finds some hardcore pornography depicting a woman being raped and Jack actually calls the cops, treating the magazine like a snuff film before being assured that she was just acting. We're alone with Sandler for the moment he realizes his son is getting off on the exact kind of degradation his sister endured, and it's the best acting Sandler has done since Punch Drunk Love.
I'm gonna give the whole movie away if I keep going on like this, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention a few moments that, if they were short films, would surely deserve Oscars even if they weren't surrounded by such stellar moviemaking. Jack manages to confront Pacino at a premiere, triggering just enough guilt in the actor to make him remember his own abuse at the hands of his father (Dana Carvey) and finally overdose in front of his multiple Academy Awards. Jill turns to drugs, eventually becoming addicted to meth and becoming a prostitute to support her habit. This storyline, the scene of Pacino ODing, and a lighthearted scene in the first twenty minutes where Jill smokes Jack's medical marijuana and eats his mother-in-law's quilt, shows a keen insight for drug abuse. The problem isn't drugs--when it's just some pot, they're harmless. Drugs are just a sympton of the larger problems that drive people to them.
I do have some complaints though. Katie Holmes plays Jack's wife, also named Jill, and she actually does an alright job, but the plot has her get killed running a red light just when the movie is seemingly looking up, with Pacino dead of his overdose and Jill going into rehab. I take the movie's point that tragedies can pile up on each other, they don't wait in line, but it still feels artificial. Also, I don't think it was in Jack's character to grow a second head which whispered all the lies I told as a child. The special effects were great in the scene where Jill pricks her finger on a hypodermic needle, becomes pregnant, and gives birth to a swarm of flies, but I hadn't been told the movie was in 3D, so I'm sure I was getting half the experience of having the baseball-sized flies buzz through the theater, eating the tears of children. Lastly, I really wanted to see in the credits who played the Anti-Mary, Whore of Babylon, who ripped away Jack's first head so all that was left was the dark parts of his soul, but instead of closing credits, I simply woke up in my car to something banging in my trunk, trying to get out, while I was covered in a substance that could've been blood, but smelled far too sweet to be an animal's. Also, there were some second-act problems.
Aside from those issues, I wholeheartedly recommend Jack & Jill, as it's far better to be one who has Watched and who has Known than to be the Meat upon which Angels must Feast. Hail Satan!
So the plot at first seems exactly like you'd expect. Adam Sandler plays Jack Sadelstein, a successful ad exec and family man (in a bitter bit of foreshadowing, we first see him telling his assistant to "sex up" a proposed ad campaign before going to pick up his son from soccer practice). He also plays Jill Sadelstein, Jack's twin sister, a granola-crunching hippie who is slowly selling out/growing up. Jill drives Jack nuts with her neediness and attention whoring, even making him take her along to his beloved Knicks game. There, they run into Al Pacino, who wants to take Jill out.
Pacino is the first off-kilter element in this movie. After a quick glimpse at the basketball game, he recedes into the background, reemerging for an awkward phone call, Jill calling him, Jack listening in on speaker phone. He talks in a subdued way, but that's almost zealous in that weariness, as if it's a part that he relishes getting to play. In a moment that could come from any Sandler movie, Jack jokes an uncomfortable Jill into going out with Pacino, hoping that he can eventually use Pacino in an ad campaign.
Jill goes to Pacino's mansion and you can hear the movie shift gears like an old car. The camera is handheld, the lighting seems too bright, and the scenery itself is off-putting--Pacino lives in a pit of obscenely artistic pornographic prints, which he never comments on even as Jill can't look away, "comedically" stuttering.
What follows is I think one of the most harrowing sequences ever put to film. For ten minutes, in what is seemingly one shot even though I'm sure there were cuts, Jill slowly comes to realize that Al Pacino is going to rape her. At first, you're kinda groaning, thinking "really, movie, you're going to make jokes about a skeevy Al Pacino?" as Jill makes wacky excuses to leave and Pacino coolly shoots them down. The audience I was with was giving it big laughs, but they died down as the scene dragged--shambled--on, with Jill becoming increasingly flustered and uncomfortable, and the movie putting no more jokes in her mouth, funny or otherwise. Finally, she outright says she's uncomfortable and wants to leave and Pacino, a vein bulging in his forehead, tells her she can't.
Things escalate to him calling her a whore and a cunt, Jill slaps him, and almost as an afterthought to the whole sequence, Pacino brutally beats and rapes her. I hate to say this, because I know it'll come off as cold, but the scene is pure cinema in his viscera. A lot of movies, when they portray rape, do so to show how evil the villain is or at least to move the plot forward. Jack & Jill seems like it's trying to replicate the anxiety and horror of being raped in cinematic form, hence the sequence playing out in real-time, no edits, no music.
The genius of this movie sets in with the context. By having Jill played by a man, it takes away the 'routine' nature of a woman being raped, but by not having Adam Sandler play a man, it also doesn't play male rape for laughs or as "worse" than female rape. And with Al Pacino playing himself, you also can't think of it as actors playing a part. It's an incredible directorial choice that strips away all the societal bullshit and shows you the crime itself, as Al Pacino strips away Sandler's dignity and power minute by minute. Pacino slowly escalates to the famous ranting we're used to from him, but in this context, you can only see it as pure misogyny instead of overacting or shtick. He just never lets you forget that he's playing himself, an amazingly brave choice. "I learned this on the set of Cruising!" he bellows at one point, preparing to sodomize Jill.
After that, the movie eschews the traditional narrative structure, especially the cliched third act of unearned sentimentality, for something I can best categorize as a spiral. A downward one. After confiding in Jack, Jill tries to report the rape, but is browbeat by the investigating officer (David Spade), who says "Cut the bullshit" enough to be a catchphrase. Pacino isn't arrested for the assault.
From there, executive producer Darren Aronofsky plays with Sandler's usual angry man-child persona, filling it with impotent rage and regret. He blames himself for what happened to Jill, as shown in a heartbreaking scene in which his daughter wanders off to pet a dog being taken for a walk, only for Jack to chase off the dog-walker in a hail of profanity and break down in tears. He goes to a law firm to see if he can file suit against Pacino, but the attorney (Norm MacDonald) lays out for five minutes the impossibilities of prosecuting sexual assault in America. It's not as visceral as the rape scene, but it's much more frightening.
Now, this is a very dark movie, but I feel the writers do a great job of almost teasing you with hope and lightness so it doesn't become unbearable. At one point, Jack finds some porn under his son's bed. In a funny little scene, he's clearly more reminiscient than angry, fondly paging through the latest edition of Playboy and checking to make sure the stash isn't big enough to make his kid a pervert (as he was discussing earlier in a scene with Nick Swardson, who plays Jack's co-worker). Then, at the bottom of the stack, he finds some hardcore pornography depicting a woman being raped and Jack actually calls the cops, treating the magazine like a snuff film before being assured that she was just acting. We're alone with Sandler for the moment he realizes his son is getting off on the exact kind of degradation his sister endured, and it's the best acting Sandler has done since Punch Drunk Love.
I'm gonna give the whole movie away if I keep going on like this, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention a few moments that, if they were short films, would surely deserve Oscars even if they weren't surrounded by such stellar moviemaking. Jack manages to confront Pacino at a premiere, triggering just enough guilt in the actor to make him remember his own abuse at the hands of his father (Dana Carvey) and finally overdose in front of his multiple Academy Awards. Jill turns to drugs, eventually becoming addicted to meth and becoming a prostitute to support her habit. This storyline, the scene of Pacino ODing, and a lighthearted scene in the first twenty minutes where Jill smokes Jack's medical marijuana and eats his mother-in-law's quilt, shows a keen insight for drug abuse. The problem isn't drugs--when it's just some pot, they're harmless. Drugs are just a sympton of the larger problems that drive people to them.
I do have some complaints though. Katie Holmes plays Jack's wife, also named Jill, and she actually does an alright job, but the plot has her get killed running a red light just when the movie is seemingly looking up, with Pacino dead of his overdose and Jill going into rehab. I take the movie's point that tragedies can pile up on each other, they don't wait in line, but it still feels artificial. Also, I don't think it was in Jack's character to grow a second head which whispered all the lies I told as a child. The special effects were great in the scene where Jill pricks her finger on a hypodermic needle, becomes pregnant, and gives birth to a swarm of flies, but I hadn't been told the movie was in 3D, so I'm sure I was getting half the experience of having the baseball-sized flies buzz through the theater, eating the tears of children. Lastly, I really wanted to see in the credits who played the Anti-Mary, Whore of Babylon, who ripped away Jack's first head so all that was left was the dark parts of his soul, but instead of closing credits, I simply woke up in my car to something banging in my trunk, trying to get out, while I was covered in a substance that could've been blood, but smelled far too sweet to be an animal's. Also, there were some second-act problems.
Aside from those issues, I wholeheartedly recommend Jack & Jill, as it's far better to be one who has Watched and who has Known than to be the Meat upon which Angels must Feast. Hail Satan!
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no subject
Date: 2011-11-13 09:20 pm (UTC)Hail Satan, indeed!
no subject
Date: 2011-11-13 09:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-13 10:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-13 11:20 pm (UTC)Jesus, until that last couple of paragraphs, I was thinking, "Holy shit, Sandler has just gone full Kaufman."
no subject
Date: 2011-11-13 11:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-13 11:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-14 07:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-16 01:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-17 06:25 am (UTC)