Gutter laughs

That’s My Boy is vulgar, shallow and often funny; it’s not for kids

Donny Berger (Adam Sandler) is an irresponsible reprobate seeking to reconnect with his estranged son (Andy Samberg) in the irredeemably vulgar That’s My Boy.
Donny Berger (Adam Sandler) is an irresponsible reprobate seeking to reconnect with his estranged son (Andy Samberg) in the irredeemably vulgar That’s My Boy.

— A friend’s eyes met mine outside the theater after a screening of Adam Sandler’s That’s My Boy. I knew what he was going to ask before he asked it.

“A man goes to the movies,” I said, quoting Robert Warshow. “The critic must be honest enough to admit he is that man.” Which was a way of saying, yeah, I laughed - so what?

That’s My Boy is funny. In spots. It’s also vulgar, lazily written and misogynistic. For long stretches it’s boring. In its best moments, it’s indecently entertaining. Very few members of the audience at the preview screening walked out, and I imagine that those who did were fairly ignorant of Sandler’s oeuvre. They didn’t know his brand - all they knew was that they were seeing the movie for free and therefore weren’t losing out by leaving.

There are any number of ways to take this review. I could feign horror at the number of parents who brought their prepubescent children to the show, but to that I’d have to pretend to be shocked by the general decline of rectitude in American society. And I’m not. I think most of us can agree that people are far more casual and slovenly than they used to be, and that anyone who makes a public display of manners these days runs the risk of being thought “hoity-toity” or (to use the favorite obliterating gesture of the chattering class) “pretentious.” I can’t pretend to be dumbfounded by the crassness of our society - I have been to Wal-Mart, I have flown Southwest and I have watched Lena Dunham’s Girls. I understand people are pigs.

On the other hand, I could make the case that there’s something transgressive and provocative in That’s My Boy, that Sandler and company are actually engaging with the hypocrisy of a culture that has never escaped its Puritan roots. There is something very honest at the nut of the story - which seems very loosely based on the sensational Mary Kay Letourneau case.

Letourneau, you may remember, was a middle-school teacher in Des Moines, Wash., who was jailed in 1998 after it was revealed that she was having an affair with one of her students, Vili Fualaau, that had begun when he was 12 years old. Letourneau served nearly seven years in prison, but she and Fualaau never stopped professing their love for each other. Nine months after her release, they married.

Depending on your point of view, the Letourneau case is either a tabloid Dumpster fire or an inspirational love story, and a filmmaker like Gus Van Sant might transpose it into a weird and charming key. But all director Sean Anders (Hot Tub Time Machine) and writer David Caspe (the TV series Happy Endings) mean to do with it is the obvious thing. A 13-year-old boy who scores with - and impregnates - his hot teacher isn’t a victim, he has won the lottery!

And what if the judge in the case not only imposes on the slatternly teacher a 30-year sentence but orders the minor child to, upon his 18th birthday, assume responsibility for raising his child? How messed up would that be? How messed up would the kid be?

Well, in the Sandler version, the kid grows up to be Andy Samberg, who changes his name and covers his tracks once he turns 18. He loses weight and applies himself and becomes a young master of the universe with a head for numbers, a wealthy surrogate father (Tony Orlando, backslid off the Nutri-system) and a mean girl fiancee (Leighton Meester).

And the baby daddy morphs into Sandler, a braying jackass of a former tabloid flash, who - all of a sudden - is facing a financial disaster from which only his long lost son can save him.

It’s a stupid premise, but that’s kind of the point, because if Sandler and company were to approach this sort of material with anything less than hyperbolic bombast and wildly exaggerated characterizations, it might begin to feel more like a human comedy and less like a crude frat boy cartoon. For like Fualaau, Sandler’s Donny Berger really loves his incarcerated teacher (played as an older jailbird by the fetching Susan Sarandon); Donny’s a lout and an entitled hedonist but he loves his blown-up family.

As is usual in these sort of things, what works best are the grace notes - Vanilla Ice and Todd Bridges are strangely endearing playing down-and-out versions of themselves, and Sandler, although he affects a ridiculously annoying Boston accent and mugs unmercifully, works a little harder than he usually does to suggest that his jerk is really just another damaged little boy.

None of that is enough to make the movie more than an empty calorie snack, but it should be noted that some junk food tastes better than others. And in its smuttiest and loopiest moments - James Caan shows up as a fighting Irish priest, and a pretty broad range of sexual deviancy is explored - That’s My Boy attains a kind of transcendent inanity. As hard-R sexual wish fulfillment comedies made for 13-year-old boys go, it’s another one.

That’s My Boy 82 Cast: Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, Leighton Meester, Milo Ventimiglia, Tony Orlando, Susan Sarandon, James Caan, Vanilla Ice, Todd Bridges Director: Sean Anders Rating: R, for pervasive language, nudity, sexual content Running time: 114 minutes

MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 06/15/2012

Upcoming Events