The Week Of (2018)

The Week Of arrives from 2018 as the fourth collaboration between Adam Sandler and Netflix, and the feature directorial debut of Robert Smigel. Two fathers, one a construction worker named Kenny and the other a wealthy doctor named Kirby, spend seven days preparing for the marriage of their children. The hotel is cheap. The arrangements collapse. A wedding is somehow staged anyway. The title cards announce each day with the grim patience of a hospital chart, and the running time feels longer than the week it depicts.

For those of us who catalog the cultural temperature of a picture, this one registers as a mostly barren field. Chris Rock shares top billing, and the young couple at the center is interracial, but the film treats both facts as furniture, present and unremarked. There is no LGBTQ thread. No feminist argument. Nothing about the climate, nothing about bodies, nothing about minds that work differently. The class friction between Kirby's money and Kenny's pride gets a workout, though the movie frames it as one man's stubbornness, never as a system worth questioning. A false World War II veteran story surfaces and is exposed, and it functions as a plot device about shame, not as any reckoning with history.

Critics were unkind. Rotten Tomatoes settled at 26 percent, and the reviews described a lazy, overlong affair. We cannot disagree with the arithmetic. What we can report is that the film commits no ideological offenses because it commits almost nothing at all. It is a wedding comedy that wants only to be a wedding comedy, and in that modest ambition it succeeds at roughly half its goal. There is a fire, a collapsing dance partner, a batch of bats released into a chimney, and a reconciliation between two fathers. The social ledger stays blank. In an era of loudly annotated entertainments, this is either a relief or a void, and the film offers no opinion either way.