In Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life George Bailey (James Stewart) sobs on a bridge late at night and wishes he were never born.  A bumbling guardian angel comes along and grants his wish, plucking George out of the space/time continuum and into a toured showcase of what the world would have been like if he hadn’t existed.  Learning the positive influences his life can have on other people, George rediscovers the true meanings of etcetera etcetera, his guardian angel subsequently earns his wings, and the show ends in a blaze of cheer and goodwill. 

In Frank Coraci’s Click, his third feature film collaboration with star Adam Sandler (after The Wedding Singer and The Waterboy), a remote control is essentially the guardian angel for Michael Newman (Sandler), though the film might try to tell you that mantle belongs to the twitchy, mad-professor type who gave it to him (Christopher Walken).    

The pitch emerges much less dramatically than Capra's: in his decorated upper-class family residence, shared with poster-girl wife Donna (Kate Beckinsale) and two kids, Michael is constantly fed up by the number of remote controls in the house and often gets their purposes muddled (he turns on the fan when he means to open the garage, turns on the stereo when he means to turn off the TV, etc).  Michael drives out at night to find a universal remote control and comes back with one that ‘controls’ his life (don’t ask too many questions).  He can guide reality using DVD remote features: fast-forward, rewind, pause, whatever.  He can even access a “making of” section, however regrettable that decision might have been. 

The gift takes its toll, as these things happen, and like the super-abilities bestowed upon the protagonists of Bruce Almighty and Groundhog Day Newman’s gift/curse will turn into moral patter for a lesson about the Important things in life.  The same wholesome, Capra-esque sentiments are still here, after all, and just as gushy as ever, but there’s also fart jokes, boob jokes, slapstick routines and David Hasselhoff.   

The film milks the comedic possibilities of a life-controlling remote control according, and to its credit the writers conjured a list of giggly scenarios that greatly outnumbered my mental notes on the train ride over, although I probably don’t need to point out that I wasn’t bound to six-figure contracts at the time.  One scene involving Hasselhoff delivering a presentation about sexual harassment to a mollified audience while Sandler edits it with his remote control to make it more interesting for himself (changing it to Spanish, adjusting the image, etc) had me in total hysterics, spluttering popcorn and guffawing while an almost packed auditorium barely raised a collective giggle.  For that I have no explanation. 

Sandler’s movies often warm to low-brow/high-concept foundations, stories based around day-to-day aberrations: a man who has to go back to primary school (Billy Madison), who can hit golf balls with unbelievable power (Happy Gilmore), who can run like a goofed-up bull (The Waterboy), who dates a girl who doesn’t remember him (50 First Dates).  Conceptually Sandler is always careful not to place himself at the center of the show - he rarely hijacks a scene from a purely theatrical point-of-view but rather comes at it from a narrative advantage that nobody else on the screen is afforded.  A scene in Click in which Sandler adjusts the contrast and colours of his face – thus inducing a tan, going green and mimicking the Hulk, etc – is funny partly because of his flamboyancy, but also because it’s cleverly tied in with a story function that gives it a much greater kick. 

Sandler is very good at putting himself in the spotlight and pretending to have done nothing to get there.  His modest, unpretentious presence is a good part of his appeal, coupled with the unmitigated pleasure of watching a quiet person erupt.  That was part of the pleasure of watching him in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love and it’s part of the pleasure of watching him here, although when Click tries to suggest that the audience should feel sorry for Michael (who is wealthy and has a beautiful wife and home) because he has too many remote controls it is not really a justifiable empathy.  Instead all that comes later on, and past the toilet gags and dogs-screwing-toys bits Click actually does manage to rustle an emotion or too from the material – for one thing, the film’s character-aging makeup is extraordinarily realistic; for another, Coraci doesn’t linger too long on the glossy serious bits, so they register with warts-and-all resonance. 

For popular stars largely perceived to be irreverent - like Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey and Martin Lawrence – the temptation to be homogenized by Hollywood’s for-the-masses mentalities must be strong.  Young motor-mouth hotshots are often the ones who end up chilling out and doing Disney movies a decade or two later – take Eddie Murphy, for example, who in 1991 was zipping up in red spandex, publicly confessing to cocaine use and cracking jokes about homosexuals, AIDS and excrement.  Now he’s as clean-cut as the Milkybar Kid, almost exclusively family-orientated - Shrek and Shrek 2, The Haunted Mansion, I,Spy, Dr. Do Little, Daddy Day Care.  I once heard that Murphy renounced his old wicked ways, and the news didn't surprise me.

I doubt Adam Sandler will ever see the need to do the same.  His films have always obviously mingled sentiment with irreverence; they are optimistic stories padded in dirty laundry and the veneer of non-PC etiquette.  Billy Bob Thornton’s slovenly turn as a blubbering alcoholic in Bad Santa largely masked the film’s hearty Christmas sentiments, and although Sandler has never leaped into parody that far he is still unflinchingly able to thrust himself into moral situations without looking especially moralistic himself.  The ending of Click certainly ebbs in the direction of a glowingly moral cul-de-sac, but we can forgive it, just as we can forgive Jimmy Stewart’s cookies-and-cream resolution in It’s a Wonderful Life.