A few years ago, Adam Sandler stepped away from the big screen and took a lucrative deal from Netflix to make a movie a year exclusively for their streaming service. Since there’s a lot less pressure with streaming – it’s a lot easier to get audiences to click on a thumbnail on Netflix than go out to a movie theater and buy a ticket – Sandler has phoned in a lot of these movies. The editors haven’t been anywhere near as ruthless as they need to be and the jokes aren’t tested out on enough people before making it into the final cut.
As a result, most of Sandler’s Netflix exclusive comedies have been lazy, overlong, disappointing movies. The Ridiculous 6, The Do-Over, and Murder Mystery were all barely watchable. Sandy Wexler starts out as a promising satire of ‘90s Hollywood, but it’s let down by its unnecessary 130-minute runtime. But 2018’s The Week Of is a surprisingly naturalistic take on the familiar culture-clash wedding story that capitalizes on Sandler’s impeccable chemistry with Chris Rock.
The Week Of tells the story of a wedding from the perspective of the fathers of the bride and groom. Sandler plays the father of the bride, a strapped-for-cash construction worker named Kenny who insists on paying for everything, while Rock plays the father of the groom, an extremely wealthy doctor named Kirby who wishes Kenny would just drop the traditions and let him pay for some of the wedding. The central comedic conflict of Kenny scrimping on everything from the venue to the visiting relatives’ hotel rooms, when Kirby can easily afford much better, leads to a series of hilarious mishaps. Everything that could go wrong with this wedding does go wrong.
Sandler’s comedic sensibility tends to include a lot of slapstick and yelling, but The Week Of is mostly about real people with real problems. There’s a hysterical scene in which Kenny is giving Kirby a ride and won’t let him turn on the air conditioning without outright saying that he doesn’t want the air conditioning on. This is the Sandler who couldn’t communicate with his brother in The Meyerowitz Stories, not the Sandler who punched Bob Barker in the face in Happy Gilmore.
The dynamic shared by Kenny and Kirby in The Week Of wouldn’t work nearly as well without actors as well-matched as Sandler and Rock. They’ve been both close collaborators and close friends since they worked on Saturday Night Live decades ago. After all that time, Sandler and Rock can anticipate each other’s comedic timing and play into it when they do scenes together. The two shared palpable chemistry in The Longest Yard and the Grown Ups movies, but The Week Of was the first time their dynamic got to take center stage.
While Sandler and Rock anchor the movie as the fathers of the bride and groom, they have strong support from SNL cohort Rachel Dratch as Kenny’s wife Debbie and regular Sandler collaborator Steve Buscemi as his dim-witted cousin Charles. The latter gets a hysterical introduction as he shows up with six-foot bottles of liquor that he snagged from the duty-free shop at the airport. The movie is filled with these kinds of moments blending something identifiable (an oddball relative getting carried away with duty-free deals) with something delightfully zany (six-foot Absolut bottles).
The Week Of was directed by Robert Smigel, best known as the voice of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, who co-wrote the script with Sandler. Sandler and Smigel have had a working relationship for years. They both worked on Saturday Night Live and Smigel has since worked on a few of Sandler’s movies as a writer and actor. Although he’d previously directed a couple of SNL segments, The Week Of was Smigel’s first feature-length directorial effort. For a first-time filmmaker, he has an impressive command of the movie’s tone, looking at lifelike situations through an absurdist lens.
After dabbling in the western and action genres (and later in the murder mystery genre) with his other Netflix efforts, it was refreshing to see Sandler pare down with a straightforward farce about a wedding that goes horribly wrong. The term “low-concept” was used as an insult against the movie by some critics, but high-concept can get out of hand quickly. In high-concept comedies, the humor comes from extravagant gags, but in low-concept comedies, the humor simply comes from the foibles of human interaction.
Anybody who stuck on The Do-Over or Hubie Halloween one day on Netflix might assume that all of Sandler’s Netflix movies are like that. But The Week Of is sort of the exception that proves the rule. Saying that The Week Of is Sandler’s best Netflix exclusive isn’t saying very much, but it’s hugely elevated by Smigel’s naturalistic tone and the Sandman’s unparalleled chemistry with Rock.