9/11 Reigns Over Film

Reign Over Me treats 9/11 as background, but it steals the show.

By Michael Gottwald, Wesleyan University

Reign Over Me, the new drama-comedy starring Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler, is the first major studio release from Hollywood to treat 9/11 as an incidental plot element. Supposedly.

Cheadle plays Manhattanite dentist Alan Johnson, who is experiencing typical husband malaise—the suits at work are breathing down his neck, and though he loves his kids, the fact that the most exciting thing he and his wife (Jada Pinkett Smith) do every night is work on a jigsaw puzzle has got him down in the dumps. He readily offers to take his daughter over to a friend’s house at odd hours just so he can get some time out of the unbearable domestic confines of his plush Upper West Side apartment. One day he comes across his old roommate from dental school, Charlie Fineman (Sandler), who looks like a mess and doesn’t recognize Alan. Charlie lost his wife and kids on 9/11, and now apparently spends most of his days puttering around Manhattan on his scooter, listening to pre-“Born in the U.S.A.” Springsteen and “Quadrophenia”-era The Who, and his nights holed up in his spookily sparse apartment, remodeling his kitchen and playing video games non-stop. Alan starts to see Charlie regularly, first out of sympathy, then because Charlie pesters him and he can’t say no.

This is where the film would have you believe that Alan and Charlie’s reunion morphs into an ultimately symbiotic friendship, as each uses the other as a companion to fill holes in their respective lives. Charlie’s circumstances help Alan to appreciate his family, and Alan serves as someone Charlie can finally open up to about that whole pesky terrorist-attack thing.

Sure, that’s in there. But really the film is about 9/11—both accidentally, because of the faults of its conception, and because of the weight the tragedy still carries. In terms of the former, Alan’s personal conflicts soon fade into the background as he spends more time with Charlie, slowly peeling off the unstable man’s layers of self-defense and self-delusion. We are left to assume that Alan’s wife is angry that he’s not home more, based merely on silly scenes in which Pinkett Smith acts passive-aggressive towards him while doing something stereotypically domestic, like brushing her hair in front of the mirror or scrubbing the dishes. Because these scenes are so few and far between, we never feel the risk of his descent into Charlie’s almost childish world of scooters and movie marathons.

Somewhat as a result, and somewhat inevitably, Adam Sandler’s character and his status as a victim of 9/11 dominate the movie. This could have totally sunk the whole endeavor, if Sandler wasn’t so damn good. Not only is his volatile persona put to even better use than it was in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love, but he nails the moments of quiet too, his voice trailing off, almost mumbling, as Charlie softly implores Alan to hang out with him just a little bit longer, to stave off the loneliness that inescapably creeps up between the Springsteen and the video games. He’s pitiful and scary and you love him for it.

With the character of Charlie placed at center stage, the film begs larger questions about our national memory and psychology. For one—at this point, can a fictional figure bear 9/11 as part of his fictional past and not have that figure become a stand-in for us all? As the movie becomes more about Charlie fighting to slowly ground himself in post-trauma reality, even when it descends into lamentable courtroom melodrama regarding whether Charlie should be hospitalized, one can’t help but consider that the film is actually tackling the state of our collective well-being half a decade after the tragedy that changed everything. At the very least, New York City, here captured in deglamorizing high definition and represented by similarly deglamorized but highly specific locales, is subject to a cinematic check-up. Even the potent image of Sandler listlessly cruising through the towering, traffic-less corridors of Midtown at midnight says something, albeit subtle, about post-9/11 Manhattan melancholy.

The movie seems to prove without a doubt that in film (and perhaps popular art/fiction in general), 9/11 can not yet be treated as some arbitrary personal tragedy that a character happens to have experienced. It was too unprecedented, too scarring, and the ramifications are too wide in scope. As good as Sandler is, the film’s most powerful moment is rooted somewhere other than our sympathy for his well-played character. Not friendly to sensual shrink Liv Tyler, Charlie walks 10 feet out of her office to the waiting room, and instead finally bears his soul to his old friend Alan. As the sounds of Bruce’s “Drive All Night” echo out of Charlie’s headphones, he talks, teary-eyed, of the last time he saw his wife and kids before they got on the plane. The performance held up, but I found myself with the same lump in my throat that I had throughout United 93, one that came from the fact that this person on the screen was talking about something that I experienced, that I remembered, that indeed we all experienced. Most of us didn’t lose our families, but the emotional terror of that day was suffered collectively, and, for better or worse, that terror serves as the source of the power of this cinematic moment. This was not sympathy; it was empathy.

Whether a film that begs empathy instead of sympathy from its audience is exploitative or merely ambitious is a question that cannot be answered in a film review. But to pretend like we can treat 9/11 cursorily in popular entertainment, even more than five years after the fact, is to fool ourselves.

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