The Cobbler (2014)

Tom McCarthy's The Cobbler arrives with an appealing premise: a sad shoemaker on the Lower East Side inherits a family stitching machine that lets him inhabit other people's bodies, provided he first inhabits their shoes. Adam Sandler plays Max Simkin with a hangdog weariness that suits the material, and the film keeps one foot in the Jewish immigrant history of its neighborhood. The supporting cast includes Method Man, Melonie Diaz, Dascha Polanco, and Sondra James, so the faces on screen reflect a genuine New York mix. That diversity functions as texture. It is not a statement, and nobody in the film treats it as one.

Politics enter through the side door. Carmen, played by Diaz, campaigns against developers tearing up the block, and a slumlord named Elaine Greenawalt eventually gets exposed and arrested for her treatment of tenants. The film carries a mild pro-neighborhood, anti-greed streak: local businesses are shaken down by a thug, the wealthy landlord is a villain, the little guy prevails. It never builds this into a systemic argument, and Carmen's activism serves mostly to give Max something to admire between scenes. A running gag in which Max impersonates a Chinese man in Chinatown is played entirely for laughs, with no awareness of itself as anything else.

Where the film might have lectured, it mostly sighs. The moral, about understanding others by occupying their lives, arrives through sentiment and a dying mother's happiness instead of a sermon. There are no queer characters, no meditation on the body, no neurodivergent perspective, no climate anxiety, and no attempt to rewrite the past. What we get is a gentle fantasy about empathy that critics rejected and audiences ignored. It was, by most accounts, the largest financial failure of Sandler's career. That is its own kind of cultural statement, though not the one anyone intended.