In Semi-Defense of Adam Sandler’s Much-Maligned New Movie ‘The Cobbler’
A lot of people aren’t crazy about The Cobbler. The new Adam Sandler movie — which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival — has gotten some harsh reviews this week, with one prominent critic calling it “easily the worst film I’ve seen in Toronto.”
That a Sandler film wouldn’t get respect from film critics is no surprise: Though he earned praise for his turns in such big-screen dramas as Punch-Drunk Love (2002) and Funny People (2009), Sandler rarely hears affectionate words from the film-critic community. But with The Cobbler, Sandler was teaming up writer-director Thomas McCarthy, the creator of such mini-gems as Win Win (2011) and The Station Agent (2003) — nuanced, big-hearted stories that were uplifting without being mawkish. If anyone could rein in Sandler’s shticky tics, and put him into a more grown-up role, it was McCarthy.
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As it turns out, the plot of The Cobbler seems a lot like a standard so-so Sandler comedy: The actor plays Max Simkin, a cobbler in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and the latest in a long line of shoe-fixers that includes his dad, who mysteriously disappeared years ago. One day, in the shop’s basement, Simkin discovers an old machine that, when used to repair a sole, allows him to replicate its owner’s body, and walk around the city in disguise. He soon gets caught up in a caper that finds him trying to outmaneuver an evil real-estate developer, leading to a finale with a revelation so ambitiously grand and weird, it earned a wave of groans at one of the festival’s press screenings this weekend.
But for all the audible dissatisfaction surrounding The Cobbler, I found myself happily engaged in its first half-hour, in which Simkin — longing to get out of his store and out of his shell — traipses around his city as if he’s seeing it for the first time in years. For all the complaints about Sandler’s man-child mannerisms, few performers can match his ability of conveying naïve, sincere enthusiasm. At first, The Cobbler plays like an agreeably whimsical episode of The Twilight Zone, with Sandler gleefully jumping from one Lower East Side character to the next.
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Then, things get worse: The real-estate subplot seems lifted from a bad 1987 Joes Pesci movie. The moral implications of Simkin’s identify-thefts — and the actions he undertakes while incognito — are never questioned or examined. And it’s distressing that the film’s sole African-American lead character (played gamely by Cliff “Method Man” Smith) is an unredeemable thug, whose body Simkin later borrows for the sole purpose of intimidating a white yuppie.
Still, for all The Cobbler’s many, many glitches — hoo boy, that ending — its spirit is worth defending, if for no other reason that McCarthy and Sandler were trying to create the kind of movie you rarely see nowadays: The grown-up fable, one that tries to walk a line between magical realism and recognizable humanism. A few years ago, McCarthy helped craft the story that would become Up, a remarkably moving (and, at times, admirably downbeat) Pixar film that managed to incorporate both of these tones; perhaps The Cobbler was an attempt to do so again, only this time, with a live-action cast. In a year filled with oft-overstuffed comic-book films, The Cobbler could have been a superhero movie in its own right, albeit one without CGI or spaceships, and on a much smaller scale. We need more movies like the kind The Cobbler wants to be; hopefully, there’s another project like this in McCarthy’s future.
