The Cobbler

THE COBBLER

Director : Thomas McCarthy

Year : 2015

Genre : Fantasy

Rating : *1/2

Making back a paltry $23,000 return on a $10m budget, Thomas McCarthy's  'The Cobbler' has gained the not-so illustrious accolade of being the lowest grossing film of Adam Sandler's entire career. The film, which tells the story of a Lower East Side cobbler who discovers a magical stitching machine in his basement has also garnered some of the worst reviews of the year so far - something we have come to expect from any typical Sandler product these days. And there's a very good reason for both of these - 'The Cobbler' is an utterly awful movie. But while 'Jack & Jill', 'Grown Ups 2' and 'Blended' are horrible due to their crass humour, vulgar immaturity and blatant lack of any discernible character, 'The Cobbler' falls flat on it's face thanks to a very different reason.

In 'The Cobbler', Adam Sandler plays Max Simpkin; a down-on-his-luck 4th generation shoe-mender who makes his living in a battered old boutique on the Lower East Side of New York. He doesn't have any friends except a barber who works next door to him (Steve Buscemi) while his loving mother is slowly deteriorating due to scenilty. However, things take a very odd turn for Max when after his usual sewing machine unexpectedly breaks down while repairing a set of shoes one day, he discovers an old piece of apparatus that used to belong to his great-grandfather and after repairing the shoes on the ancient stitcher, Max finds out that the machine actually has magical properties - namely that when he tries the shoes on, he takes on the appearance of the owner! Stunned by this miraculous revelation, Max goes on a journey of self-discovery as he takes on the personas of the lowly and wealthy of the Big Apple.

 

While I never shy away from voicing my hatred of the large majority of Adam Sandler films, I always go into one of his movies praying that he will give a performance as brilliant as his knock-out portrayal of the love-struck toilet plunger seller Barry Egan in Paul Thomas Anderson's 2002 masterpiece 'Punch Drunk Love'. In that film, he gave us a rounded character which was full of nuances and sensibilities and it is for this reason why I wholeheartedly despise the crop of diarrhetic garbage that he and his production company Happy Madison has continued to splurge out over the past decade or so. In 'Punch Drunk Love' he proved that he can be a very good actor indeed and that he doesn't have to keep debasing himself to the puerile comedy of his latest Razzie winning disasters. Max Simpkin is certainly a step in the right direction and while the film is all over the place, the thing that remains consistent throughout 'The Cobbler' is the conviction of Sandler's central performance. Much like Barry Egan, Simpkin is a character of nuance and depth, continually battling the interior and exterior commotion that is his life and waiting for a short moment of respite. Much like 'Punch Drunk Love', 'The Cobbler' proves that Adam Sandler is an actor capable of great emotionality. So why he keeps going back to the 'Jack & Jill's, 'That's My Boy's and 'Grown Ups 2's time and time again, I will never know. 

 

From it's opening credits set in the 18th century, Thomas McCarthy sets up 'The Cobbler' as a timeless Jewish fable, almost like a Capra-esque fantasy in the vein of  'It's A Wonderful Life'. The wonderful Yiddish music by John Debney and Nick Urata which underlays a large majority of the movie certainly seems to emphasise this point and for it's first third or so, I was on board with McCarthy's strange but rather likable ideas about identity and self-belief. However, things quite unexpectedly go off the deep end when Max begins to use the magical abilities of the stitching machine for his own pleasure such as taking on the guise of a handsome man (Dan Stevens) to simply ogle at his model girlfriend in the shower and posing as a violent thug (Cliff Smith) to steal his watches to name just a few. From this point on, 'The Cobbler'  completely lost me and it only continued to lose me as Sandlers escapades led him down narrative paths a million miles away from the initial and very interesting premise. What began as a sweet fairytale ended up being a quite obnoxious and sometimes offensive mess that didn't know whether it wanted to be a comedy or a drama and in the end, it's neither. It lacks the laughs to be a full-blooded comedy and it doesn't have any drive or intent of threat to be a drama. But I want to be clear - the faults with 'The Cobbler' don't lie with Sandler. They lie with the story and the screenplay.

Gaining a measly 9% on Rotten Tomatoes, 'The Cobbler' ranks as one of the lowest rated movies in Adam Sandlers entire filmography and while it isn't technically as bad as many of his more recent debacles, it is still an unsatisfying and wholly ill-judged affair that has the outward facade of an awards contender but hides the disgustingly crass gizzards of a typical Happy Madison production. Not only does it damage the reputation of a once faultless director but it also destroys the best performance that Adam Sandler has given in over a decade and for me, this is the biggest crime of all.