Director: James L. Brooks, 2004
Stars: Adam Sandler, Paz Vega, Téa Leoni
Out to buy and rent: on DVD
Like his last film, As Good As It Gets, Brooks’s comedy-drama features a relationship between a saintly doormat and an unsympathetic brute. Except the genders are reversed: in the Helen Hunt role, Sandler’s chef is surprisingly likeable; but Leoni, as his neurotic wife, never musters the charm with which Jack Nicholson imbued the awful Melvin Udall. Brooks acknowledges that he and Leoni had their differences. It shows. Happily, he cast Vega as the couple’s Mexican nanny. As her casting session shows, the beautiful Spaniard, who speaks no English, has the emotional fluency to light up any film.
DVD extras Commentary by Brooks and crew; documentary; deleted scenes; casting sessions; sandwich-making featurette; DVD-Rom screenplay.
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Ed Potton