A Film Canon

With the exception of Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison, Adam Sandler's solo films have tended to play as ninety-minute extrapolations of his Saturday Night Live creations - or, worse, as extrapolations of characters that never even made SNL, creations left on the cutting-room floor. At one level, Jack And Jill is the degree zero of this approach to film-making - not even up to the standard of a feature-length SNL sketch, it doesn't feel that different from the trailer, as if the latter were actually shot first, and then everything else filled in later. Worse, it's bookended by two extended pieces of product placement, for Dunkin' Donuts and Royal Carribean Cruises - although to describe them as product placement understates how much they actually drive and structure the film, which itself comes to feel like a product placed awkwardly, incongruously and incidentally within a ninety-minute advertisement. As a combination of trailer and advertisement, then, the film doesn't differ all that much from the pre-film entertainment, for which it registers a certain hokey nostalgia - and, while this nostalgia is certainly part and parcel of the film's studied anachronism, its affection for sound-stages, it unfortunately doesn't translate into any particular charm on Sandler's part. Fueled by a staunch commitment to cross-dressing over drag, and a quaint, family-friendly oblivion to the possibilities of sexual confusion, Sandler is immediately upstaged by David Spade's brief cameo, which is in keeping with the stronger, camper Chris Farley school of SNL drag. What makes Jack And Jill such a compelling experience, then, is the way it positions Al Pacino, who plays himself, but without any of the narcissistic self-deprecation typical of 00s celebrity self-performance (the contrast with Johnny Depp, with whom he makes his entrance, is instructive). If anything, after a decade of self-referential genre roles, and increasingly heightened theatrical roles, Pacino finally dovetails filmic and theatrical self-awareness, achieving a powerful fusion of theatre and cinema that not only beautifully and bathetically presents him as a kind of journeyman-actor, but places him, in some sense, outside the ambit of the film itself. If Sandler's films always rely on a bloated paratext, a commitment to Sandler as a concept that anchors and grounds the film, then Pacino in some sense takes on that burden in Jack And Jill, making the film feel like a paean to his acting career, and especially the way he's tried to creatively reimagine it over the last ten years - allowing for a Sandler film that, oddly, can be enjoyed without really enjoying, or even watching, Sandler himself.