Bedtime Stories

After the second movie of the day, I took stock of myself. Could I really make it a three-movie day? I had charged only ten dollars and fifty cents off the AMC gift certificate card from my sister. But another? I was in uncharted waters, but the answer was "yes."

After a heavy meal of back-to-back two hour dramas, I thought I needed a comedy for desert. There were several choices, but after Will Smith and Tom Cruise, it was just too tempting: I just had to finish up with Adam Sandler. It seemed perfect in a masochistic "I survived this" kind of way.

With an hour and a half break until the late afternoon show, I foolishly decided to drive up a half mile to the Barnes and Noble on the New Hampshire side of the state line. In the hellish post-Christmas traffic, I spent the next twenty minutes getting there, but unable to turn left into the parking lot, so I abandoned and turned around. By the time I got back to the multiplex parking lot, I had just enough time to grab a bite to eat and buy my ticket.

I was looking forward to Bedtime Stories like a crucifixion. Sandler is one of my all-time least favorite actors. If I weren't going to see every movie, there is no way you would catch me in the theater paying money for this, even with a gift certificate card.

Making it worse, the auditorium was crammed full of families with kids, making it hard to find a decent seat. "Serves me right for going to see a family comedy on the opening weekend." I settled for a seat close-in along the left-hand side. It took a few minutes to adjust to the angle.

After the previews, the Disney logo came up and the movie started. What happened after that can only be described as...magic. It must have been the Christmas seasonal spirit at work, because not only did I begin to enjoy this movie, but by the end of it, I downright embraced it.

Huh? Am I actually writing this? What happened inside that auditorium that could turn this Sandler-hating Grinch into a fan of this movie?

The story is about a young boy, the son of a Los Angeles motel owner from the old days, who grows up to be a handyman (Sandler) in the hotel which was built on the grounds of the previous motel. Already we have a wonderful metaphor for the transition from the classical era of Hollywood (old motel) to the postmodern (new high-rise hotel). But that's just the beginning.

When Sandler's character was a boy, his father (Jonathan Pryce) told him bedtime stories in which the boy was the protagonist. This is trick I learned ironically the last time I was in Los Angeles, helping some friends move. One of their sons fell and cut his forehead open. We wound up in the emergency room of the Pasadena hospital, and I was drafted to keep their injured son preoccupied with an impromptu story about pirates. Since I'm a horrible storyteller, I succeeded by making him and his younger brother the main characters, and letting him help create the story on-the-fly by repeatedly asking him: "So what do you think happened next?" Anyone with kids probably knows the same trick.

Anyway, in the movie, the grown boy (Sandler) is called upon by fate to babysit his sister's young children for a week, and circumstances (lack of television, i.e. absence of the postmodern) force him to tell them bedtime stories. Unlike his father, however, Sandler's character puts himself as the main character, and his stories suck.

Thus in narrative terms, Sandler represents the degraded contemporary man, who has not outgrown his childish egocentric nature. That he has been demoted from owner/manager (his father) to lowly handyman is a perfect outward expression of this.

The story will demand, of course, that he outgrow his latent boyhood and discover the principles of classical manhood as embodied in his deceased motel-owner father (who fittingly continues to serve as the disembodied narrator of the framing story). Likewise we know that in doing so, he will rise to become the manager of the sparkling postmodern hotel and restore justice to it. Moreover, since this is a romantic comedy, his newfound manhood and sense of honor will result in his finding the love of his life.

How will get there? Through the use of narrative, of course. Over the course of the week he spends with his niece and nephew, he discovers that whenever the children tell part of the bedtime story, those parts of the story find a way of coming true the next day. At first, being the inferior man, he attempts to exploit this for egocentric gain, but every such attempt backfires. But despite himself, his resolution to let the children tell the story eventually will win the day.

The "coming true" part of the story was where I felt danger approaching. From the trailers, it seemed like this movie would be crammed with willy-nilly magic, such as an improbable torrent of gumballs from the sky. I was more than pleasantly surprised to find that the movie remained within the naturalistic world, and that everything happens through the "magic of coincidence." Nothing wrong with that. The only truly goofy part of the movie are sight gags involving the CGI'd pet guinea pig, who may or may not be the actual source of the "magic." Leaving things up to doubt like that is very classical, by the way.

Thus the story is not only about the classical-postmodern duality (motel paradigm and decline of the son), but is explicitly about the power of narrative to restore the classical order in reborn form. Moreover it suggests that such narrative power is inherent in the human spirit (contained in the souls of children), and that humans yearn for storytelling as way not only to understand the world, but to shape their own lives in ways that seem like magic. The key is to let go of the idea of oneself as the lead character in the epic of the world. As a result, you can have the best of both the classical and postmodern worlds.

At the end of the movie, I couldn't help think that Sandler was the perfect choice for the role. Inside the strait jacket of Disney, he flourished. He should consider working only with Disney from now on.

When I got back to the farmstead, just in time for dinner, I told my sister and her kids about the movies I'd seen. My sister thought maybe they'd all go see a movie the next day, maybe "the dog movie." I set them straight with a better suggestion.