Adam Sandler’s “Blended” Is a Failure for the Ages

The romantic comedy “Blended,” starring Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore, which opens today, is grotesquely offensive. The romance is sweet and even effervescent, the comedy is homespun and sentimental, but it’s packaged with such a repellent batch of stereotypes and prejudices that it’s unpalatable even to contemplate. As with other business catastrophes—and, of course, the jury is still out on whether this one will end up being a financial disaster or merely a moral one—the most interesting questions are meta: How in the world could they have done this? And who are “they” and how did they manage, for the duration of this production, to check their common sense at the door? The making of “Blended” could be a “what went wrong” story for the ages.

The framework of the movie is simple and strong, if hackneyed: two suburban single parents, the divorced Lauren Reynolds (Barrymore) and the widowed Jim Friedman (Sandler), meet on a blind date that quickly veers to disaster. Vowing never to meet again, they nonetheless cross paths in their neighborhood—a turn of events that foreshadows the core of the plot, when an odd coincidence thrusts them and their families (his three girls, her two boys) together at a resort. And, of course, it’s the children who convert the adults’ mutual distaste into love.

This setup isn’t obviously absurd—and the movie is a showcase for its stars. I’m a fan of both of them, and both are excellent here. Sandler, a Jewish Everyman with the tone and the look of a live-action Fred Flintstone, comes off as a man of the world—or, at least, of his world. He plays the manager of a sporting-goods store, and when he wields a pen and jots down figures, he seems to do it from experience. He speaks with garlicky wit and understated humor; his easygoing delivery, harking back to the stoic manhood of studio-era stars, suggest hearty feeling and hints at inner struggle. And Barrymore’s perky energy is equally harnessed to hidden panic and unexpressed pain. The movie’s blithe comedy hints that adulthood is hard.

It’s only when Jim and Lauren get to the resort that “Blended” enters the realm of the irredeemable. In the hope of brightening their children’s spring break, Lauren and Jim—unbeknownst to each other—buy a mutual friend’s unused ticket to a South African safari resort, which turns out to be a quasi-therapeutic family retreat. But even before the trip begins, the children screech, “We’re going to Africa!!,” suggesting precisely the skewed and generic view of life in that country—and on that continent—which is, in short order, presented.

No sooner do the families arrive at the resort than the obliviously trivializing depictions of black people, based on long-superseded stereotypes, begin. The Friedmans get out of their limo and are greeted by the hotel’s staff, all black, starting with a singing group, called Thathoo (pronounced “Tattoo”). The group leader’s eye-rolling and glad-handing, his lubriciously insinuating and exaggeratedly jiving, all seem to be taken straight from a minstrel show. And, throughout the movie, the group pops up like a Greek chorus to underline the action. There’s also an obsequious greeter whose exaggerated ingratiations would shame the hospitality business. Though his malapropisms are ultimately seen to be a canny joke, his manner is never anything but grinningly servile. And there’s an elderly slacker, sleeping on the job and avoiding responsibility, whose lazy ways are a monstrous and venerable cliché.

For that matter, the movie is also reactionary in its gender stereotypes, with Jim standing in as athletic counselor to Lauren’s younger son and Lauren taking over the styling of Jim’s unhappily tomboyish older daughter, whom he calls Larry (her name is actually Hilary, and it’s one of the gags of the movie that the middle girl’s name is Espen—she’s named after ESPN).

I'm astonished by the failure of the skilled and successful moviemakers involved in “Blended.” This encompasses the director, Frank Coraci, who directed one of Sandler’s better movies, “Click”; the screenwriters, Ivan Menchell and Clare Sera, both of whom have been in the business for around twenty years; and a team of veteran producers including Sandler himself. I wonder whether anyone on hand during preproduction or the shoot had an inkling of the offensiveness of the script or the depictions—and, if so, why they either said nothing or went unheeded. Did they prefer to ride the speeding train with the rest of the cast and crew past the edge of the cliff?

“Blended” starts with the ordinary and touching problems of ordinary people—divorce, bereavement, misunderstanding, frustration, responsibilities—and if it had sought to resolve them at a hotel in the Catskills, or, for that matter, had even looked at the people working at the resort in South Africa with as tender a camera eye as the one that films Sandler, Barrymore, and the actors playing their children, it might have had a chance to emerge as a passably sweet, honorably sentimental, if somewhat old-fashioned entertainment.

It’s an ongoing issue in the realm of movies, though: the money that actors, directors, producers, writers, and others make in Hollywood; the layers of insulating staffers that their success buys; the fame and influence that they win; and the peculiarly outsized and distorted self-image resulting from celebrity, distance them from the lives and concerns—as well as the practicalities and the psychology—of ordinary life. Which is to say, how can people living extraordinary lives depict ordinary ones? How can those inside the bubble credibly embody those outside it? (A strong director with a coherent view of life helps: Sandler was superb in Judd Apatow’s “Funny People” as a famous comedian who grew too big for his britches and gets deflated to natural size—at least temporarily.)

In an earlier age, when the theatre was centered on heroes of myth and history, it was the actors who were small, who had to raise themselves up on tiptoes and expand themselves to fit their roles. The riot that actors ran, the uninhibited emotional voracity that rendered them odious to staid burghers (plus ça change), helped them feel the authority and cavalier freedom of the mighty. In movies, for the most part, actors have to scale themselves down, even as they render their everyday heroes hyperbolic, lending ordinary people grand and tragic emotions.

I suspect that the makers of “Blended” didn’t intend to give offense, that their depiction of black South Africans was meant to be sincerely affectionate, that their gender stereotypes were based on what they considered to be experience and observation—that the movie reflects not evil designs but a narrowed scope and a filtered point of view. In earlier Hollywood movies, the prejudices built into society at large were reflected onscreen. The exclusions were so numerous and strong that the studio era’s highly distilled sense of the ordinary represented only a small sliver of American society and held it up as an abstract ideal for everyone else. Those older hierarchies were conscious; those of “Blended” seem oblivious. Maybe that very obliviousness makes them an image, an X-ray, of the unconscious and unintended, but very real, exclusions and prejudices at work in even some of the most liberal sectors of American life today. The movie’s misguided blunders are revealing. They could even serve as a sharp critique—also doubtless unintended—of the filtering bubble of suburban middle-class life.

Photograph: Warner Bros. Pictures