Release Date: March 13, 2015 (Limited and VOD)
Director: Thomas McCarthy
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Adam Sandler’s filmography over the last decade or so has been a seemingly never-ending cavalcade of repugnant unfunny dreck, churned out on a yearly basis, much to the chagrin of critics everywhere. They all mostly follow the same crude, soul-crushing formula, but for some reason Sandler fans keep coming back for more. His latest venture, The Cobbler, may be a tough pill to swallow, however, even for the die-hards out there.
Co-written and directed by Thomas McCarthy, who previously helmed the heartfelt indie drama The Visitor with Richard Jenkins and the downright fantastic Win Win with Paul Giamatti, the film stars Sandler as Max Simkin, a lonely, fourth-generation New York City cobbler. When I first read about this film, I saw the director and a brief synopsis and thought, “okay, I like when Adam Sandler does serious roles, and I like Thomas McCarthy so a film about a cobbler walking a mile in his customers’ shoes sounds interesting.”
What I didn’t realize was that Sandler walking in other peoples’ shoes was literal. His character discovers a magical stitcher in the basement of his shop that literally allows him to inhabit the bodies of his customers whilst wearing their shoes.
The reason Sandler fans may have a tough time with this one is that it’s not presented like your typical Happy Madison production, with the over-the-top visual gags and crude sensibilities. While it is still very much a comedy, the goofball elements have been removed and replaced with such a high level of saccrine that I was concerned I left the theater with diabetes. This makes the overall experience much less enjoyable, and by the end of the film, I was kind of hoping that Sandler’s character would just crack and start going nuts, robbing banks and doing other devious things whilst transformed as others. In a movie about a cobbler who can turn into Method Man, one would probably think the plot is rife with shenanigans, but no, it’s just a boring mess.
Conveniently, everyone he turns into happens to have his shoe size, a 10½. He only chooses men’s shoes, except for a pair of red stilettos that turn out to be for a transvestite, which seems like another wasted opportunity for some interesting developments in the story, where Sandler could have become a woman. Wouldn’t he have searched everywhere for a pair of size-equivalent ladies’ shoes just to see what it’s like to be a woman?
Which leads me to the question of why Sandler could only transform in size 10½ shoes. Why not size 11s? If the entire body transforms, wouldn’t the feet transform as well, thus fitting into the footwear? Also, he is a skilled cobbler, so he could easily adjust a smaller shoe to fit his larger feet, right? If not, why were neither of these questions addressed?
He does wear the shoes of a dead man at one point, which is yet another interesting idea that is only explored briefly to scare some people later on in the film.
Imagine an Adam Sandler movie with all the exuberance sucked out of it, and that’s what you have with The Cobbler. It’s a dried husk of a fairytale that does nothing with its shtick, leaving me wondering how anyone involved in the creation of this could have thought it was working. Just to see Dustin Hoffman look into Adam Sandler’s eyes and proudly proclaim Sandler’s destiny as a cobbler (a “keeper of soles”) without completely losing his shit is a testament to the man’s composure. Myself on the other hand, not so much.
