Reign Over Me Blu-ray delivers stunning video and great audio in this excellent Blu-ray release
Former college roomates Charlie Fineman and Alan Johnson meet up again by chance on a Manhattan street corner. Five years after losing his family on 9/11, Charlie — once a successful dentist — has retreated from his
life, and Alan is stunned to see the changes in his formerly gregarious friend. At the same time, Alan — who
should be enjoying his beautiful wife, children and career — is overwhelmed by his responsibilities. Their rekindled
relationship becomes a lifeline for the two men, who are both in need of a trusted friend at this pivotal moment in
their lives.
Adam Sandler reportedly hesitated to take the role of Charlie Fineman in Reign Over Me,
because it scared him. He should get scared more often, because the film is some of his finest
work, better by far than the string of juvenile comedies that have followed (with the exception of
Funny People). Audiences may not have turned up in droves once word got out that Sandler was
playing serious, but over time I suspect this will be one of his movies that lasts.
Writer-director Mike Binder has had an unusual career. With roles in major films like Minority
Report and The Contender, he brings an actor's point of view to filmmaking. He's said
that he
always sets out to write a comedy, but, like the great dramatist Chekhov, much of his comic
writing shows life at its saddest and most tragic. Then again, like the great clown Bozo, Binder
often falls flat on his face. His HBO series, The Mind of the Married Man, was reviled left
and
right for its perceived misogyny and its doleful portrait of marriage, even though the husbands
routinely came off worse than the wives. (I'm one of the few people I know who liked the series,
and my own wife still looks at me strangely for it.)
Binder doesn't live in New York, but he happened to be here on September 11, 2001, and, as he
explains in an interview on this Blu-ray, the experience started him thinking about survivors who
had suffered enormous loss that day. The train of thought ultimately resulted in Reign Over Me,
which, contrary to some perceptions, is not about 9/11 (a subject to which Binder is careful to
minimize references in the film). It's about the necessity of making connection with others to
deal with life's obstacles, whether it's a sudden, catastrophic trauma or small, daily problems that
pile up until they seem insurmountable. Binder doesn't say so on the disc, but if reports are
accurate, neither Sandler nor his co-star, Don Cheadle, were his first choices to play the two
leads. It's impossible now to imagine any other actors in the parts. As unlikely as the pairing may
have seemed at the time, Cheadle and Sandler succeeded in giving Binder what he wanted: a
comedy, more or less, about a very serious subject.
At its core, Reign Over Me is about two men who have lost the ability to communicate with
anyone, but for different reasons: one through the steady accumulation of daily pressures caused
by work and family, and the other by an unimaginable tragedy whose grief he cannot get past.
Because both souls suffer from a similar condition, it can be tempting to draw a false equivalence
between the causes, but that would be a mistake. They have arrived at the same place and, as a
result, end up helping each other—to each other's surprise—but the routes are entirely
dissimilar.
Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle) has a successful dental practice, a lovely home, a devoted wife, two
adorable daughters—and he's suffocating. He feels like every moment of his life is spoken for by
some obligation, either at the office presided over by his fearsome receptionist, Melanie (the very
funny Paula Newsome), or at home presided over by his cheerful but iron-willed wife, Janeane
(Jada Pinkett Smith). It's never spelled out how Alan wound up this way, but a hint is provided
by a visit to his aged parents, where his father (Anthony Chisholm) rants endlessly about
everything. Clearly, Alan is trying to do the opposite by pleasing everyone.
Driving home from the office one night, Alan spots his college roommate and dental school classmate,
Charlie Fineman (Adam Sandler), on a motorized scooter and calls out to him, but Charlie is too
absorbed in his music to hear. Alan tried to reconnect with Charlie after learning that his entire
family—a wife, three daughters and the family dog—died aboard one of the planes that flew into
the Twin Towers on 9/11. But Charlie doesn't want to be found. When Alan does track him
down, he discovers a suspicious and protective landlady, Adell (Rae Allen); an accountant and
former best friend, Sugarman (director Binder), who administers Charlie's survivor settlement
and initially suspects Alan of being a scam artist; and the late wife's parents, Jonathan and
Ginger Timpleman (Robert Klein and Melinda Dillon), who are desperate to get Charlie to talk to
them.
The man at the center of this maelstrom just wants to be left alone to listen to music, collect old
records, jam on drums and guitar, play the Shadow of the Colossus videogame and renovate his
kitchen (a non-stop pursuit whose purpose will eventually be explained). Try to talk to him about
his family and he runs away (or screams, if he's prevented). At various points in his encounters
with Alan, Charlie suddenly becomes convinced that Alan is a spy, and his abrupt eruptions of
fury are truly disturbing.
Gradually, though, Alan and Charlie strike up a bizarre friendship based on student experiences
so far in the past that they can barely remember most of them. Certainly their current lives have
nothing in common, which is largely the point. Each serves as a disruptor of the other's routine.
Charlie keeps Alan out until all hours and takes him places he'd otherwise never go, whether it's
to a rock music club or an all-night festival of Mel Brooks films. Alan gets Charlie into the one
place he's been refusing to go, namely, a therapist's office: in this instance, the office of Angela
Oakhurst (Liv Tyler), who has space in the Park Avenue building that houses Alan's dental practice. Alan
has been waylaying Angela for months seeking advice for his own problems, but now he's
brought her a real patient. She eventually helps Charlie, though not quite the way anyone
expected.
And Charlie helps Alan, first by being someone who gets him to say out loud what's bothering
him about his life, then by so destabilizing his home life that both Alan and Janeane are forced to
start talking to each other again instead of pretending that everything is fine. (Which is probably
what Angela would have advised if Alan had ever made an appointment.)
Not everything in Reign Over Me works equally well. A bizarre subplot featuring Saffron
Burrows as a wacko dental patient who first comes on to Alan, then accuses him of improper
advances, feels shoehorned into the movie so that, by the end, there's a potential love interest for
Charlie waiting in the wings. (It also fulfills Binder's apparently endless compulsion to have
beautiful actresses recite sexually explicit dialogue, which was a signature element of his HBO
series.) An elaborate third-act development involving a psychiatric evaluation and a court
proceeding feels contrived, especially since it depends for its resolution on the intervention of a
kind and worldly state court judge played by Donald Sutherland. As entertaining as it may be to
watch Sutherland's Judge Raines put the appropriate parties in their places, anyone with even a
passing familiarity with the New York State court system knows that such a character is as likely
to be found there as a unicorn.
Still, these are minor quibbles in a film that gets so much right in its depiction of a genuine
friendship between two men who draw not so much strength as inspiration from each other,
because each reminds the other that there's more to him than the seemingly narrow world in
which he currently finds himself trapped. That Cheadle and Sandler make this relationship so
convincing and involving, and also frequently very funny, is a tribute to both actors.
Although the credits list a "negative cutter" and a logo for Kodak film, director Binder confirms
in the "Behind the Reign" interview that the film was shot on the Panasonic Genesis digital
camera (whose logo also appears in the credits). Like other advocates of digital photography,
Binder is enthusiastic about its ability to capture substantial detail of a cityscape by night, with
significant depth of field and without the need for huge lighting rigs. The many late night scenes
of Charlie riding through nearly deserted city streets that stretch into the distance could not have
been obtained other than through digital cinematography. (The cinematographer was Russ
Alsobrook, with whom Binder had worked on The Mind of the Married Man and who would go
on to shoot Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Superbad.)
If indeed any segments were shot on film, they were homogenized with the digital photography at
the digital intermediate stage. Sony's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is an early example of the
fine work that would quickly become the norm for Sony's output on the format. Black levels are
solid, detail is excellent, and the only artifacting on display is the occasional digital noise that is
a
product of the original image capture (usually on a street or other surface in the distance).
Another studio might have decreed the removal of all such noise at the expense of image detail,
but Sony doesn't work that way.
The film's palette tends toward cool blues, which is consistent both with the winter season and
with the chilly emotional temperatures that both male lead characters find themselves
maintaining (or trying to maintain). Within this overall framework, certain environments are
notable for their warm colors, e.g., Angela Oakhurst's office.
This being an early Sony release, the lossless track is PCM 5.1. (Sony would later experiment
with Dolby TrueHD before settling on its current standard of DTS-HD Master Audio.) Although
cityscapes, dentists' offices and New York apartments with music rooms and massive videogame
setups would seem to present natural opportunities for surround effects, Binder doesn't exploit
them. This may be a function of the story, but more likely it results from the limited budget
(reportedly $20 million). Most of the funds allocated to the soundtrack were probably spent on
acquiring the songs essential to creating Charlie's private world, since his taste in music is
specific and the subject of many arguments with Alan. The title song is heard in two versions: the
original track from The Who's Quadrophenia and a faithful cover by Pearl Jam. Bruce
Springsteen's album The River plays a crucial role, as do the Graham Nash song "Simple Man"
and the Pretenders' rendition of Ray Davies' "Stop Your Sobbing". Without these songs, the film
would be greatly diminished; their importance far outranks that of any surround effect. (They
also sound great.) The moody underscore is by Rolfe Kent, whose extensive credits include
Sideways, Legally Blonde and Up in the Air.
Dialogue is always clear, but, equally important, so are the details of the actors' performances.
An actor himself, Binder understands how to write for actors to fill in the blanks. A classic
example is the scene where Don Cheadle's Alan storms out of his apartment to take a walk, and
his wife tells him to say hello to Charlie. Alan keeps walking back into the room to deny that
he's visiting Charlie, but he can't finish a sentence. If you looked at the words on the page, they
wouldn't add up to much, but the scene as played by Cheadle and Pinkett Smith becomes a
sketch in miniature of the current state of the Johnson marriage.
The highest compliment I can pay to the soundtrack for Reign Over Me is that it's transparent.
You forget you're listening to a movie soundtrack and just listen to what's happening.
Behind the Reign (HD; 1.78:1; 16:51): An interview with writer-director Binder
on a
variety of issues, including his initial inspiration for the script, his casting choices, the
chemistry between Cheadle and Sandler and shooting in New York City with the
Panasonic Genesis camera.
Jam Session with Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle (HD, 1080i; 1.33:1 & 2.39:1;
4:40): After a short introductory interview session with the two actors, in which they
describe how they were intimidated by the scene in which their characters jam on the
guitar (which Cheadle doesn't play) and drums (which Sandler was just learning),
unedited footage follows containing much entertaining improv.
A Still Reign (HD; various; 5:35): A montage of production and publicity stills,
set to the
Pearl Jam version of "Love Reign O'er Me" heard during the end credits.
Previews. Trailers for Coming to Blu-ray, Paprika,
Click, Spider-Man 3 and Superbad.
It may be some years before Reign Over Me can be fully appreciated. We are still in a period
where too many elements of American society want to "own" 9/11, just as various characters in
the film want to "own" Charlie Fineman's grief. As 9/11 recedes into history, Binder's story of
two men who need each other will become more clearly defined in the foreground, where it
belongs, and the strength of the performances and the filmmaking can be judged entirely on their
own. I think they'll hold up well. The film and disc are highly recommended.
