Reign Over Me: A Review

I'm weary of the nights I've seen inside these empty halls - Jackson Browne

Over the last few days, since walking out of Reign Over Me, my mind has drifted through the past. Gin Rummy with Dave. Luther’s rib night with Sam. Madden ’92 (and ’93 and ‘94) with Kevin and Chris. The X-Files and Spades with Brien, Erik, and Kyle. The Bayou Kitchen with Jeff. Lupie’s, or the gym, or jogging, or a hundred other things with Brett. These are just a few of the friends that have walked through my paths, and some of the things that we did together.

At the core, I don’t think these kinds of associations are wrong when engaging Reign Over Me, because at its core, the movie is a reflection on the healing power of friendship. It introduces us to two men, Alan Johnson and Charlie Fineman, and lets us see the tender place their friendship has in each other’s lives.

Alan Johnson is a man that we have seen before. He’s making his way in his 40’s and is hitting his professional stride. A dentist, he has a successful Manhattan practice, a beautiful wife, and a kid that seems well-adjusted. He’s playing life at the top of his game, and of course, is completely bored with the whole experience. Alan isn’t really facing a midlife crises so much as a midlife malaise, an inability to look within and find what’s wrong when all around him seems to be going so well.

And so Charlie comes into his life. His old college roommate, Alan sees Charlie one night and tries to run him down. He doesn’t, but then sees him again, and so they reestablish their connection. It’s an odd reunion, as the Charlie he meets is a shadow of his old self, lost in a world of grief after losing his family in 9/11. Now, he is a true eccentric, spending his days constantly remodeling his kitchen, playing video games and music, and surrounding himself with his ever-expanding LP collection.

This is “Charlie World,” and for all the plot points that Reign Over Me works through, “Charlie World” is its strength. It is in this world that we get to dwell with these two men, ably played by Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler, as they fight through Charlie’s erratic madness and his inability to rebuild his life to forge a new friendship.

While the movie centers around Charlie, its success is driven in large part because it successfully develops Alan as a fully orbed character. Alan looks to Charlie with charitable eyes, but the reality is that Alan needs Charlie too. Alan loses himself in “Charlie World,” rediscovering pleasure he had long forgotten in evenings playing video games, laughing at Mel Brooks movies, and jamming to Bruce Springsteen records. For Alan, the drive of career and the responsibilities of family had left him forgetting a part of himself, and it is somewhere in the pleasures of these evenings that he starts to remember.

The movie walks a fine line, because the pieces that help Alan rediscover himself are things that could just as easily derail a man in his place. I doubt most readers think of a video game junkie, an obsessive collector, or a movie hound as the stereotype of a well-adjusted adult male. In fact, it is these very pieces that are Charlie’s escapes from reality, the fantasy world he is able to build up around himself to run from the pain that the real world gave him.

But these tools work for Alan, because in the end they aren’t the real salvation. His salvation is found in the redemptive work of real friendship. Alan’s world, with a good career and a great family was incomplete because of a lack of real male friendship. It is through his journey with Charlie that he is able to understand the ways in which he was running his life largely on autopilot, retreating into self-pity and pulling away from the very people he loved most. Charlie spent his life running away from grief, while Alan spent his running away from boredom. They needed each other to figure out how to engage the world again. The friendship that they forge is built on a healthy investment of fun time together, not on a forced and artificial intimacy that is disconnected from the basic pleasures they find in living.

Watching the movie, I was reminded of Fight Club and Lord of the Rings, two movies that have this constant theme of male friendship, as well as Wild at Heart, a book by John Eldredge that deals with “rediscovering the heart” of Christian men. When Eldredge’s book was published, I knew of a few men that misread his work and decided that they needed to spend their weekends rock-climbing to capture the essence of Christian “manliness.” I don’t think that’s what Eldredge was saying, anymore than Fight Club was an invitation to have spontaneous brawls or Lord of the Rings was an invitation to dress in elven cloaks and run to the woods. But the misinterpretations that each of these works brought about only drive home how elusive this concept of friendship, and particularly male friendship, can be.

We are a nation of lonely men. The solitary nature of our work and commuting lives, the declining number of close friendships outside of the family, and the isolating nature of our technologies, leaves far too many of us without real companionship. And no matter how strong our marriages can be, or how devoted we can be to our families, the absence of real male friendship is a hole in our lives for which there is no real substitute.

My favorite moment in Reign Over Me came in a small conversation towards the beginning of an otherwise uneven and derailing third act. While the movie itself started to doubt its own convictions about this larger theme, as it attempted to solve all of the problems in a formulaic and broad manner, it gives us this small conversation between Alan and Charlie. Alan is playing the role of tender friend, speaking with candor about some of his own frustrations with his own life before turning to Charlie’s problems, probing for a way to help his friend. Charlie, looking down and giving a classic Sandler wry grin, says “Man, I’m more worried about you.”
Did you hear that? Charlie, who threw the rest of his life away when tragedy took its best parts, is more worried about his friend who has the success and family that are miles away from Charlie’s life. The success of the movie, though, is that his statement rings true. Friendship does that, making us care more about the other guy than we do about ourselves.

Jesus himself said that the greatest love we can have is to “lay down our lives for our friends.” His vision, a vision which Reign Over Me echoes in the palest of fashions, is that of a self-denying love, a love that finds its greatest satisfaction in the well-being of the other person.

I walked out of the movie (alone, appropriately enough) with a sense of gratitude for the friends that have made their way through my paths, some for a season and some for a lifetime. I miss them, and am reminded that the gadgets that pervade my existence, the priority of family and ministry, and the tyranny of busyness, schedules, traffic and excuses must not keep me from pursuing that basic need for male friendship, a need for which there is simply no substitute.

Anyone up for barbecue?