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Big Daddy
with Adam Sandler, Leslie Mann, Jon Stewart, Cole and Dylan Sprouse, Peter Dante, Alan Covert.
How to order An Ideal Husband
Oliver Parker, director; with Jeremy Northam, Cate Blanchett, Julianne Moore, Rupert Everett
How to order

Summer is here, and in between seeing The Phantom Menace and The General's Daughter (why does this sound like a porno novel from the early 1950s?) some moviegoers seek that which they used to call "highbrow" a few decades ago. An Ideal Husband, inspired by the Oscar Wilde play, would seem to be the thinking person's beat-the-heat movie. Wrong-- it is mere pretentious offal. But surprisingly, one of the more provocative and perspicacious summer films is Adam Sandler's Big Daddy, which pushes more political and social hot buttons than, well, I'm not sure what.

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Oliver Parker's An Ideal Husband must have looked great on paper. After a rush of successful Shakespeare, Henry James, and E.M. Forester adaptations, here is one of Oscar Wilde's wittiest and most subversive plays projected on the silver screen. The play resolves around an explosive London political scandal involving money, sex, and blackmail. The film is fancied up with fabulous performers: Jeremy Northam as Lord Chiltern, an MP with a past; Cate Blanchett as his wife, a woman of the highest, unobtainable, ideals; Julianne Moore as the blackmailing Mrs. Cheveley, a woman who knows less than she is willing to tell; and openly gay Rupert Everett as Lord Goring, the Oscar Wilde stand-in dandy and everybody's best friend, even if he gets his own wedding in the end. What could be bad?

Oliver Parker, screenwriter as well as director, has rewritten Wilde's play, substantially altering its elegant form. Parker has kept most of the witty lines, but many feel out of place now that the film is more like a page from "The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde." In the original, Sir Chiltern is being blackmailed by Mrs. Cheverly because years ago he had sold confidential state secrets to a speculator. When confronted, Sir Chiltern cannot go to his wife because she holds him to an impossibly high standard. This domestic drama is circumvented by Lord Goring, an ostensibly flippant pansy who has more sense than anyone else in the play. In Wilde's version, Goring is the play's central character, the outsider who knows what is right and wrong and is willing to sacrifice himself for it-- marry, if need be, the cunning and destructive Mrs. Cheverly. But screenwriter Parker makes the morally feckless Chilterns the film's protagonists. Wilde's play is a highly moral comedy of manners in which Lord and Lady Chiltern learn that the world is a complicated place and that impossibly high ideals can be as damaging as distressingly low ones. The transposition undercuts Wilde's whole point, and, in essence, heterosexualizes the play. Wilde had to suffer two years' hard labor for the crime of consensual sodomy; in a more just world, the art police might do the same for Oliver Parker.

Big Daddy, by contrast, looks on its face like a dumb-bell Adam Sandler vehicle. But as it unfolds, there are some surprising and startling moments. The plot is simple: Sonny Koufax (Adam Sandler) is a 32-year-old unemployed law-school graduate who lives like a teenager and has no sense of personal responsibility. Girlfriend Corinne (Leslie Mann) gets sick of him and leaves. Sonny devises a way to win her back. Through a quirk of fate, Sonny's roommate Kevin (Jon Stewart) has fathered a child five years earlier whom he knows nothing about. The child's mother is dying and sends the kid from Buffalo to New York to live with his pa. Kevin is out of town, so Sonny pretends to be Kevin in order to appear responsible to Corinne. While this is hardly Shakespeare-- well, it's a little like the plot of A Winter's Tale-- it's workable as a hook on which to hang innumerable jokes about male sexuality, bonding, affection, and piss.

Julian (Cole and Dylan Sprouse) is an incredibly cloying five-year-old. Before Sonny agrees to take the boy on, he makes sure the youngster know how to "wipe himself." With that assurance, Sonny teaches the boy such mischief as pissing in doorways, and tripping up rollerbladers. Frankness about bodily functions is a key theme here: ads for the film show Sonny and Julian pissing together in a doorway. Sonny is looking out for the cops, but his gaze even above Julian's head has an unmistakable homoerotic tinge. The film contains several of these scenes, including one at a row of urinals with Tommy (Peter Dante) and Phil (Alan Covert), a gay couple and Sonny's best friends. Gay characters don't crop up much in films whose intended audience is boys age 13 to 16. When they do, gay characters are rarely so physical with each other. Refreshingly, there are no even slightly queer jokes. Someone asks Sonny if he was upset about these two friends from law school becoming lovers. "It's no big deal," he answers, "they just watch different porno."

Perhaps the most surprising scene in the film is a nighttime bath in which Julian suddenly stands up and demands to know why he has to wear underwear in the tub. Sonny explains that he isn't sure what the rules are about grownups being around naked kids. Well, this is silly. Any grown man given the task of bathing a five-year-old would understand that it is reasonable and appropriate for the child to bare all. Unless, well... unless what? Why has this scene been included? It has no logic in the film. It only makes us think more about Julian, Sonny, nakedness, sexuality, and whatever. And that's part of why Big Daddy is the so startling, edgy, and gay.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com