Coraci: Blended (2014)

It’s no coincidence that Adam Sandler has worked with Drew Barrymore more consistently than pretty much any other actor during his career, nor that she’s the closest he comes to a genuine foil. Since The Wedding Singer, something has set their films together off from Sandler’s body of work, tempering both the anarchic and sentimental poles of his screen persona into something resembling a genuinely feel-good ethos, a feel-good ethos that somehow remains distinctly 90s. Blended, as the title might suggest, takes us to a place where that rapport has become so natural and intuitive that even when Sandler and Barrymore are at loggerheads, it doesn’t really feel that much less affectionate or simpatico than when they’re making love. As a result, there’s a curious and comforting lack of net movement or development to Blended, which starts with Sandler and Barrymore sharing a disastrous double date, only to reconnect later on when they get to know each other’s kids, and start to sympathise with each other as single parents. Part of what gives the film its momentum, then, is a quite dramatic change of location, taking us from Sandleresque suburbia to a resort for “blended” families – families in which both parents have children from previous marriages –  in the luxurious Sun City casino in the North West Province of South Africa. Certainly, it’s yet another example of Sandler’s almost ludicrous ability to expand product placement into the entire venue and backdrop of his film (the cruise ship in Jack and Jill seems quite tame by comparison), as well as a pretty neat embodiment of everything that’s insular about his worldview, with what amounts to resort blackface intruding from time in a kind of SNL Ladysmith Black Mambazo outfit that keeps turning up to offer choric refrains at critical moments. At the same time, though, it’s a backdrop that absorbs a lot of the most preposterous moments in the film, leaving Sandler and Barrymore room to groove into the tenderness that they only really seem to nail when they’re acting together – a tenderness that often feels as if it’s gravitating this “blended familymoon” into something closer to an updated Brady Bunch, or one of the latter-day Brady Bunch movies. Happy Madison films tend to involve Sandler accepting who he is, and getting every other character to accept and like him in turn, but Blended nails the way Barrymore encourages him into a more blended awareness, open to change in ways that may preclude the insane edge that makes his other comedies so distinctive, but for the sake of a different kind of warmth that fits him just as well.