Reign Over Me (2007)

The film arrives in 2007 wearing mourning clothes and calling itself a buddy picture. Adam Sandler's Charlie lost his wife and daughters on one of the planes, and he now spends his days renovating a kitchen that requires no renovation and playing a video game whose fallen colossi receive more ceremony than his grief will allow. Don Cheadle's Alan, a dentist with a comfortable life he cannot feel, drifts toward him. The central transaction is simple. Two men sit in a diner, and one of them listens.

What the picture declines to do is instructive. Charlie's despair is rendered as a private wound, not as a case study in a larger argument. Race is not a subject here, despite the interracial friendship at the center. Cheadle's Alan and Jada Pinkett Smith's supporting turn exist as people instead of statements, which in 2007 was ordinary casting practice, not a posture. Nobody lectures. The therapist's office, the courthouse, the commitment hearing all remain inside the bounds of one man's damage. There is no sermon, no thesis, no invitation to applaud our own sensitivity. The film is too busy being sad.

Where it fumbles is where most therapeutic dramas fumble, in the tidiness of recovery. The courtroom breakdown, the mother-in-law's reversal, the kiss on the cheek. The machinery of resolution grinds audibly. Yet the film never mistakes its characters for symbols, and that small restraint earns a measure of respect. A modest, uneven, genuinely felt piece of work. It asks nothing of us except attention, which is more than most of its era's earnest pictures can say.