Gary Cooper created his most classically chivalrous character as Longfellow Deeds, the big-hearted small-town hero who inherits a fortune and tries to use it for the greater good in Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). Planting slobby Adam Sandler in that same role makes you wonder what other marvels of miscasting Hollywood could achieve if the rest of Capra's canon were revamped.
Reuniting Tom Green and Drew Barrymore for the Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert roles in It Happened One Night? Showcasing Jesse Ventura as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington?
Capra made Cooper's Mr. Deeds and his pals in Mandrake Falls, N.H., honest and reticent to a fault, and eccentric in endearing ways, to contrast starkly with the fast-talking city slickers who discredit the hero and swindle him. Sandler and his director, Steven Brill, and his writer, Tim Herlihy, turn Deeds and his best friends into loudmouthed, beer-guzzling practical jokers - a frat boys' view of common men and women. There were elements of condescension in Capra's vision, but this Mr. Deeds shows outright contempt for its characters and its audience. Sandler, Brill and company have lost faith that anything subtler than a poker spearing a foot can win a laugh.
It's an update that plays like a travesty. Amazingly, Sandler wants to re-create the romantic uplift of Deeds' attachment to Babe Bennett (Jean Arthur in the original, Winona Ryder here). Once again, she's an ambitious New York reporter who comes on to him incognito, as a fellow babe in the woods, filing stories that depict him as a clueless rube - until conscience, and love, get the better of her. But Ryder's Babe looks as if she never emerged from the clutches of Bram Stoker's Dracula and assumes her innocent disguise so awkwardly that Deeds would have to be a mental defective not to suspect her of subterfuge.
Despite Capra's golly-gee reputation, he was immensely more sophisticated in his depiction of the press than Sandler and company. Capra and his screenwriter, Robert Riskin, knew how the cutthroat dailies of their day could swing between skewering celebrities and fawning over them, and they were evenhanded enough to give their press corps the camaraderie of honor among thieves. The new film's Inside Access host (Jared Harris) is even more rapacious than its main bad guy, a corporate sleaze (Peter Gallagher) who wants to buy Deeds' shares in his great-uncle's multimedia business and sell it off piece by piece.
For all of Cooper's innate elegance, seen today, the propensity of his Deeds to sock show-offs and pretenders in the nose can make you a little queasy. (Were there no assault laws in 1936?) But Sandler hauls off exaggeratedly and incessantly, pounding Babe's partner-in-deceit into the sidewalk, knocking down a recalcitrant football star for one of the teams he owns and turning tennis balls into lethal weapons in a match against the man who wants his stock.
When I rented the old movie at my local video store, the clerk sighed with relief and said: "You don't know how I despair over what people go for today."
Watching Capra's work now, you're reminded of a time when mass comedy could be delicately calibrated, with gags building from scene to scene and within each scene; the climactic courtroom sequence, one of the high points of American populist comedy, is balanced between broad strokes and uproarious gestures. In the Sandler remake, every time the filmmakers filch one of the original's good gags, they blow it up or run it into the ground; and they add all sorts of awful new ones, like giving Deeds a long-ago-frostbitten foot whose deadened state renders it impervious to pain.
On the very narrow plus side of the ledger, John Turturro taps some deep-seated silliness as Deeds' foot-fetishist manservant; with micro-split-second timing, an accent roughly akin to that of Gidget the talking Chihuahua, and a joker's gleam, he grabs comic victories from the jaws of potential humiliation. But the filmmakers appear to think that the Rev. Al Sharpton and John McEnroe are funny just for showing up as themselves, while Steve Buscemi's cameo as a kook named Crazy Eyes offers a tinny echo of Mel Brooks' sometime sidekick, the late Marty Feldman.
And what of Sandler himself? "Adenoidal monotone" might make him sound more colorful than he is. Maybe we're in such a confused era that the flattest personalities become the biggest stars because so many varieties of viewers can project their fantasies upon them. But even as a tabula rasa, Sandler is one skimpy piece of foolscap. What's upsetting to think about is not how this Mr. Deeds trashes the earlier one, but how it may turn out to be the version the contemporary audience prefers.
Mr. Deeds
Starring Adam Sandler and Winona Ryder
Directed by Steven Brill
Released by Sony/Columbia Pictures and New Line Cinema
Rated PG-13
Running time 91 minutes
Sun Score *