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Anger Management
Written by David Dorfman
directed by Peter Segal
starring Adam Sandler, Jack Nicholson, Woody Harrelson.
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What is it about Adam Sandler that makes him such an (almost) unerringly popular screen idol? Sure, last summer's Mr. Deeds was not the blockbuster hit it was intended to be, and the Christmas-time release of Eight Crazy Nights, Sandler's animated Hanukkah feature, were less than raves. But in the onslaught of an incredibly productive career these are small hesitations. Anger Management however--which has received mostly positive, although somewhat guarded critical notices--has moved into blockbuster box office status. No doubt this is due, in part, to the casting of Jack Nicholson as Sandler's co-star. But the power of Anger Management is generated more by Sandler's low-key comedy than by Nicholson's high-energy, overdrive craziness. And while Nicholson's name will draw an older audience, undoubtedly it is the younger, 14-to-20-year-old, male audience that has given the movie its box office motor.

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Written by David Dorfman and directed by Peter Segal, Anger Management is an old-fashioned sort of male-male comedy, but unlike the films of Laurel & Hardy or Jerry Lewis & Dean Martin, with an ostensibly mean, modern edge. In retrospect, these earlier movies are Hollywood romances; film historian Ed Sikov writes in Laughing Hysterically about Lewis & Martin movies being queer love stories--in which two guys have to figure out the best way for them to exist as a couple in a complicated world. While Laurel & Hardy epitomized (using the stereotypes of the British music hall) the idea of the male bumbler, Lewis & Martin did something quite different. Lewis played upon the American theatrical tradition of the gawky, feminized Jewish male (think Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, and Danny Kaye) and Martin drew upon the image of the suave (usually Italian) immigrant ladies' man. By pairing them in a loving if sometimes squabbling couple, all of their films presented us with a complicated, and usually quite funny, comparison and analysis of male gender roles. In traditional theater terms, Martin was the "straight man" who fed Lewis, "the stooge," the jokes. But the reality was that both of the performers were embodying and making fun of their own stereotypes.

In Anger Management, Sandler and Nicholson fall, pretty neatly, into the traditional Lewis & Martin roles. Here Sandler plays Dave Buznik, a guy so repressed and afraid to show his feelings that he's seriously stifling his emotional and romantic life. This is a modern incarnation of Lewis's characters, who were so repressed that they regressed into infantile gestures and babble. Buznick, though a series of bizarre circumstances, ends up in being tutored by Jack Nicholson's Dr. Buddy Rydell, a world-famous authority on anger management. Of course, the joke is that Rydell is crazy, and while he is supposed to be helping Buznick control his anger--which, indeed, he can't even express--he is really acting more and more out of control and pushing his student to get angry.

On paper, this may have looked great--Nicholson neatly falls into this "Here's Johnny!" manic mode of performing, and Sandler repeats his afraid-of-growing-up Schmoo routine. But the film is only so-so. For the most part it's too obvious and unoriginal, and its "surprise ending" feels like a cheat. But what is interesting about Anger Management is just how far the filmmakers are willing to go to get jokes from the implied homoeroticism between Sandler and Nicholson.

This gay subtext is there--just as it is in the Martin & Lewis movies--but even in our modern, "Queer as Folk" and "Will and Grace" times, critics find it difficult to mention or talk about. What are we to make, for instance, of the scene when Nicholson insists on sleeping with Sandler in his bed, and then removes his underpants once he is under the covers? Even more overt is the scene when Nicholson decides that Sandler should pick up Galaxia, a transvestite hooker played by Woody Harrelson. Just like Dean Martin's sexy character giving Jerry Lewis's looser character tips on getting laid, this triangulated romantic entanglement reeks of homoeroticism.

This homo-theme runs through most of Sandler's work. Sure, he almost always turns out to be heterosexual. But his ambiguous sexuality is always signaled through his repeated refusal to adhere to traditional male gender roles. Like Jerry Lewis, Sandler glories in playing the infantalized, sexually-repressed heterosexual: he can't fight, he can't defend himself, he can't get angry. If there's a theme running through Sandler's films--particularly Waterboy, Punch Drunk Love, even Little Nicky--it's that his character needs to get in touch with his own anger, which always opens the door to his hidden (hetero)sexuality. Sander's movies aren't gay--although it would be quite interesting to see what he would do with an explicitly gay character who was burdened with his non-traditionally male gender affect. But they are certainly queer. Of course, most critics have pegged Sandler as simply (and often simplemindedly) comic, and have little interest in discussing his films as anything other than rather routine, if accomplished, commercial comedies. It's too bad, because even with its obvious flaws, Anger Management is far more interesting than that.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com