Get off my case. Some people seem upset when I point out to them that it is a kind of phoniness that Alan Johnson doesn't cheat on his wife in this movie. Why are they upset? Because they think I mean he should cheat on his wife in the movie. That's not my point. My point is that you could make a movie (like "Forrest Gump") about a soldier who engages in numerous battles and sees numerous atrocities and never actually fires his weapon at anybody, to allow your audience the illusion that someone could serve "honorably" in Viet Nam by pretending that they didn't go there to actually kill anybody, drop bombs, or even fire their weapons.
The film-makers want to titillate the viewer with the possibility that Johnson would cheat, while providing the cheap moral comfort of the idea that he didn't, so you don't have to feel bad about liking him.
The Alan Johnsons of real life, given the circumstances offered in the movie, do cheat. But we prefer our fairy tales. [added April 2008]
It should tell you a lot about this movie that Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt were both considered for the role of Charlie Fineman. Come on--- do you really think anyone serious about dramatizing an emotional breakdown would consider Cruise or Pitt for the role?
Nobody here is interested in someone who can really act or can be convincing as an emotionally disturbed man, like, say, Christian Bale. What the producers wanted is someone the audience would love, because otherwise they would understand immediately how preposterous the storyline is. If you are not rooting for Adam Sandler (or Pitt or Cruise) because he is a charismatic star, you would never believe the behaviour of the psychiatrist, or the judge, or the cops, or even Alan Johnson, or Johnson's kids, or his wife. That's because what you are really watching is a projection of your own self-image: you feel like you are a good person who feels compassion for disturbed individuals, because you feel affection for Sandler.
Although... maybe you don't..
It also tells you something that the music that Charlie listens to obsessively is Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, and The Who, rather than, say Tom Waits, or Dylan, or Leonard Cohen, or someone genuinely edgy. It tells you that someone is playing it safe-- Springsteen, for example, is critically respectable, but not as original or interesting as Tom Waits. So the movie is not cheap, tacky Hollywood, but Binder doesn't quite really want to do anything quite really daring.
One of Binder's previous films, "The Upside of Anger", featured an ending that was so ridiculously preposterous, it completely destroyed all of the dramatic tension built up by what was, until then, a fairly satisfactory narrative. Here, he doesn't even get that far, the ending is almost equally preposterous and unsatisfying.
Spoiler: in "The Upside of Anger", a woman's husband disappears one day. She assumes he left her for his secretary and becomes bitter and disillusioned. She takes up a relationship with washed-up baseball star Kevin Costner; they have a crisis or two, save the family and...then they find her husband's body in a pit behind the house. You realize that one day the man disappeared, and she never took the slightest steps to find out what happened to him. She just assumed he ran out on her. Without any possessions, of course. Without any evident planning or foresight. And she never called the police, and they never conducted even the most rudimentary investigation which would have revealed that his disappearance almost certainly was not planned or premeditated, and so on and so on...
And you are asked to believe that when he didn't return to the house one day, it never occurred to his wife to take any action whatsoever to find out what happened to him. Binder didn't think audiences would have too much trouble with this...
