HuffPost is now a part of Verizon Media
Will This Oscar Season Be A Turning Point For These Veteran Movie Stars?
Renée Zellweger, Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler and Shia LaBeouf step into rich roles that double as meta commentary on their careers.
By Matthew Jacobs
Murphy, like Zellweger, discovered Hollywood lost any sense of what to do with him. Once ranked among comedy’s most reliable leading men, he scaled back on live-action work after his “Dreamgirls” boon gave way to “Norbit” (2007), “Meet Dave” (2008) and “Imagine That” (2009). Critics savaged all three films, and the box-office revenue was equally rough. Murphy’s fast-talking theatrics — so winning in edgy ’80s and ’90s hallmarks like “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Coming to America” and “Bowfinger” — had become one-joke gambits. If “The Nutty Professor” flaunted his range, it also turned into a curse. Afterward, most writers handed him increasingly childish buffoonery (“The Adventures of Pluto Nash,” “Daddy Day Care”).
His late-2000s decline called Murphy’s longevity (and decision-making) into question right as Hollywood was shifting from a star-driven marketplace to a franchise-driven one. “I don’t whore myself out as easily as I used to,” Murphy told Rolling Stone in 2011, a sentiment he re-emphasized to Ellen DeGeneres two years later: “I don’t wanna do anything else that sucks ever again.”
With “Dolemite Is My Name,” Murphy lives up to his promise. (Let’s just forget 2016’s maudlin “Mr. Church,” a magical-Negro blight if ever there was one.) Not only does “Dolemite” not suck; it also identifies with Murphy’s struggle to find ace material as he ages, much in the way that “Judy” softly comments on Zellweger’s history. In bawdy stand-up comic Rudy Ray Moore, whose under-the-radar career soared after he poured all his might and money into the 1975 blaxploitation romp “Dolemite,” Murphy finds a kindred spirit. Like him, Moore’s presence was that of a coarse jokester with a vulnerable core, equal parts demanding and defenseless.
Rudy is so accustomed to rejection — and so defiant in the face of it — that, when his passion project wins over audiences at its Los Angeles premiere, the beam on his face acts as catharsis. At the premiere in Toronto, “Dolemite Is My Name” director Craig Brewer (“Hustle & Flow”) called the film Murphy’s own passion project. Surely it was gratifying for the actor, who was there in the room, to hear the crowd’s raucous laughter and to know that he, too, is worthy of another shot.
Interestingly enough, one of Murphy’s comedy peers is playing around with his legacy in adjacent ways. Adam Sandler, another funnyman who parlayed “Saturday Night Live” renown into blockbuster clout, pulls off something that only a beloved movie star can: He makes you love him in spite of the loathsome character he portrays.
Sandler has long tested audiences’ patience for infantile dimwits, from “Billy Madison” and “The Waterboy” to “Big Daddy” and “Little Nicky.” But in the 2000s, he found opportunities to broaden that palette. “Punch-Drunk Love” capitalized on his uncouth persona for a deceptively graceful romantic comedy, while “Reign Over Me” and “Funny People” showed he could telegraph grief without sacrificing charm. When Sandler revisited his old ways, he seemed listless, as if he’d tasted lobster but was stuck eating boiled eggs again. And yet the Netflix production deal he signed in 2014, which yielded four antic-laden comedies in which he looked particularly bored (see also: this year’s “Murder Mystery,” which wasn’t part of that arrangement), generated massive viewership.
Sibling directors Josh and Benny Safdie, who toyed with Robert Pattinson’s matinee-idol image in 2017’s “Good Time,” know how capitalize on Sandler’s skills in “Uncut Gems.” Presenting the movie at a screening in Toronto, the Safdie brothers said they wrote the role of Howard Ratner, a skeezy New York diamond dealer, specifically for Sandler. He turned it down, then wisely changed his mind. In Sandler’s hands, Howard’s intense unlikability is almost an afterthought. (The movie begins with his colonoscopy, which is poetic because he’s such an a$$hole.) Howard lies to his clients, cheats on his wife, disregards his kids. He’s childish, but not in the clownish manner that Sandler usually exhibits.
All id, Sandler wears a smug smile on his face. He’s more gleeful and engaged than we’ve seen in years (“The Meyerowitz Stories” being an arguable exception). His eyes are wider, his forehead more expressive. Employing their signature kinetic style, the Safdie brothers cede the screen to Sandler’s every move, the camera drifting around him as though he is directing the action. If Murphy’s grin in “Dolemite Is My Name” is happy-go-lucky, Sandler’s in “Uncut Gems” is testy-go-lucky. (Coincidentally, the Safdies are reportedly set to direct a remake of Murphy’s breakout movie, “48 Hrs.”)
Were a lesser-known actor to play Howard, “Gems” might not work. It’s hard to spend two hours in the company of someone that incorrigible without established affection for the person inhabiting him. But here, because Sandler seems so enlivened by the material, it’s a treat to watch him feel his way through Howard’s recklessness — a movie star doing what only a movie star can do.
And he already got a nom for Punch Drunk Love I think.
