Sandy Wexler (2017)

Adam Sandler's 2017 Netflix offering concerns a talent manager of boundless enthusiasm and negligible judgment, working the fringes of 1990s Hollywood. Sandy Wexler lies compulsively, manages a ventriloquist and a daredevil, and falls for a singer named Courtney Clarke, played by Jennifer Hudson with the patience of someone who has read the script. The film is a Happy Madison production, which is to say it arrives with certain expectations and meets most of them. It runs 131 minutes. It feels longer.

For a Sandler vehicle, the cast is unusually varied: Hudson in the female lead, Terry Crews, Lamorne Morris, Arsenio Hall, plus a phone book of cameos. The film presents this ensemble without comment, which is its own quiet achievement, and without any apparent interest in examining what a Jewish manager and a Black performer might mean to each other in that industry at that moment. Critics noticed the pairing. The movie does not. Courtney's rise to stardom is real enough, but she exists chiefly as the object of Sandy's devotion, and the film shows no interest in her interior life beyond the drinks and the bad boyfriends. There is no other social program on offer here. No environmental anxieties, no body politics, no questions of identity. Sandy's lying is a comic quirk, not a diagnosis.

The film does build toward a lesson about telling the truth, delivered by Weird Al Yankovic, of all people, and it lands as a personal note about one man's habits. Nothing is preached. Nothing is demanded of the audience. The satire of show business stays affectionate, and the ending rewards the industry instead of indicting it. A gentle, overlong, harmless piece of nostalgia that asks nothing of anyone, and gives roughly the same in return.