“Reign Over Me” Poignantly Examines 9/11’s Ripple Effect

Following 9/11, there appeared to be an uneasy truce within the movie industry that an undisclosed waiting period would have to be endured before movies could be released about the tragedy and studios could begin capitalizing financially. Five years later, “United 93” and “World Trade Center” were released, likely opening the floodgates for a host of films on the subject. That’s why a movie such as “Reign Over Me” serves as a refreshing departure from the in-your-face, grittily detailed projects, functioning as a more subtle vehicle to show the impact borne by those who were left behind, the survivors who carry loss around with them each and every day on the same streets that once meant something different.

“Reign Over Me” covers the tale of Charlie Fineman (Adam Sandler), a lost soul who said goodbye to his roles as husband, father and dentist after his wife and three daughters were killed on one of the terrorist flights on 9/11. Eerily resembling Bob Dylan, Fineman shuffles his way through the remainder of his life, wandering through the deserted streets of Manhattan on his electric scooter as the rest of the world sleeps and confining himself to his apartment to play the video game Shadow of the Colossus while the rest of society endures the ebbs and flows of workaday life. He is literally and figuratively living his life backwards, tuning out the present with his ever-present iPod, listening to 1970s and 1980s music, staving off the memories in the best and only way he can.

Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle) is a successful dentist with a beautiful wife (Jada Pinkett-Smith), two daughters and a thriving practice. Beneath the façade, however, he feels disrespected and unfulfilled at work and stifled at home, locked into photography classes and puzzles with his wife and picking up his daughters from ballet and soccer. Less obviously than Charlie, Alan is also trapped, his being an estrogen-dominated world. He sees his former college roommate, Charlie, scooting around the streets a couple of times and eventually catches up to him, knowing that Charlie lost his family and has been out of touch for years and years. Charlie doesn't even recognize Alan or recall going to dental school, leading Alan to wonder what has happened inside his one-time friend to create this parallel existence for him. What begins is a give-and-take, back-and-forth relationship in which Charlie and Alan are trying to help the other in their own way.

Writer, director and comedian Mike Binder, who shone on the excellent, underrated “Mind of the Married Man” and “The Upside of Anger” weaves in and out of the lives of these two men without being overtly sentimental or maudlin, a careful dance. Relying heavily on symbolism that is rampant — but not obvious — Binder creates a world where Alan is allowed to live on “Charlie Time” as long as he obeys the unwritten rule and doesn’t delve too deeply into their shared past or ask about the family that Charlie has pushed into the back of his mind. Every time Alan willingly or unwittingly crosses into that territory, he’s met with anger, rage and aggression from Charlie … who eventually always comes back to the one and only friend he has left. Wealthy due to government payouts and insurance policies, Charlie still lives in the same apartment his family shared, in a constant state of atonement only he can perceive and make sense of. He continually revamps the kitchen, only to tear it to pieces and start again. Why? Because this way the last major project his wife had given him, the basis for an argument that constituted their last words before she and the girls were ripped from him, combining elements of post-traumatic stress order and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Binder asks us to imagine having a fight be the last communication with a loved one before they died unexpectedly, a very real and problematic possibility.

It’s a dream role for Sandler, as the perpetual funny man who has been trying like hell to make the leap into a serious actor. He’s able to blend fragility, humor and charm into a mix that is hard to ignore, punctuated by heavy scenes where he finally lets down the veil and acknowledges that his compartmentalized past is not so far from the surface after all. Village Voice compares his role to Bill Murray’s turn in “Lost in Translation,” while the New York Daily News and Baltimore Sun also laud his performance. Sandler is indeed at his best as the wounded, disengaged, perpetually adolescent drifter. When Alan learns that his father passed away while he and Charlie were watching a movie, Charlie’s response is whether Alan wants to go for breakfast or Chinese food. When Alan is understandably aghast at Charlie’s lack of compassion, Charlie sends his business manager to give him a million dollars as a way of saying sorry. These occurrences help us to see the level of denial with which Charlie is and has been enduring.

Yet it is Cheadle who sparkles in this film, as has become his custom in most of his work. Despite the outside appearance of success and happiness, he is brooding and dissatisfied, coming to the realization that, like Charlie, he has no true friends or outlets. Playing Shadows of the Collosus, sitting through Mel Brooks marathons, riding on the back of a scooter through crazy traffic, eating Chinese food in the middle of the night … these are as cathartic to him as they are to Charlie, even if Alan passes the time off as his way of “helping” Charlie.

To be fair, the Rolling Stone brings up some potential holes in the film, though in my opinion they harp way too much on these minor details and miss the over-arcing picture. Pinkett-Smith is admittedly underutilized as the wife, Saffron Burrows is a somewhat-convenient vehicle as the Alan-stalked-turned-Charlie-love-interest, and Liv Tyler misses the mark as a weak and pliable therapist, but the Sandler-Cheadle dynamic more than makes up for these mishits.

In the end, Binder comes up with the perfect ending to a movie that must have been incredibly tricky to end without coming across as Pollyanna-ish or too tidy. He uses music (“Love, Reign O’er Me,” the song that inspired the title, is a Who tune once described by Pete Townshend as dealing with someone going through a “suicide crisis,” making it ideally relevant) and the scooter as bridges between the past and the future and Charlie’s world and the real world. Binder even manages to bring up questions involving the justice system, whether grief can be measured on legal time, when it is OK to give up on someone, and how quickly people are discarded into the mental health system and deemed broken and unfixable. The result is a terrific flick, one of first and perhaps finest that has gone beyond the actual playing out of 9/11 into the mode of the survivor, those left behind to pick up the pieces and how they are often paid off and forgotten.

Whether the Oscar juggernaut is brave enough to recognize Sandler, Cheadle, Binder and “Reign Over Me” and match the courage it took to make this film remains to be seen, so you may have to judge for yourself whether this is a landmark movie or just another take on a tragedy. The truth may lie somewhere closer to the middle, but this is among the more poignant and well-crafted films I have seen of late.