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There may be spoilers!
Charlie Fineman (Adam Sandler), who lost his family in a tragedy, (the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11), still grieves over their deaths. He runs into his former college roommate, Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle), and the two rekindle their friendship. Alan vows to help his old friend come to terms with the terrible loss. This is a simplification of the basic story of Reign Over Me.
This movie is, however, a story of how fate intercedes in our lives when we ourselves may be powerless do any thing about our own states of being. Alan is stuck in a life that he knows is no longer fulfilling. He feels friendless and out of touch with his own reality. He is unable to communicate with his wife and his associates at work. He can't express his feelings and as a result feels lost and distant from his own world. He chances upon Charlie on the streets of Manhattan while driving from his job. Eventually he meets and discovers that Charlie, (who originally does not remember Alan), is living in a false reality of his own. Charlie has gone back to a time in his life when he had no family. He lives as if he were still a student playing in a rock band, collecting vinyl records of the 60s and 70s bands, and playing video games. He has escaped to a better and safer time in his life where there are no bad guys and he has a lot less to lose. Everyone in this movie is affected in some way by the tragedy that has affected Charlie and his remission to a formerly different and better (?) place. His landlady is his protector and great enabler. His in-laws are subtracted from his life because they would take him back to the reality that his family is now gone from his life. And Alan is most affected by him because Alan wants to, (in at first a selfish desire to escape from his own reality) to be with Charlie as a means to subtract himself from his own stifled reality and then he wants to find a way to help Charlie begin to recover from his self-induced guilt and denial of loss. It is through this relationship that not only is Charlie able to begin to heal himself but that Alan, in fact, learns to communicate and sate his true desires with his associates at work and, eventually, is able to admit to his wife he has not been able to communicate his real feelings to her but that he strongly wants to because he does love her. It is in fact a poignant moment in the film when the stuff has hit the fan and Charlie is being confronted with the reality of being put away that he and Alan are talking about the situation together over "Chinese" that Charlie states that he is in fact worried about Alan and not himself.
This movie will, if you let it, take you through a river of emotions and leave you thinking. It will have you laughing at how Charlie uses his words, like people really do in everyday life, to make a comical statement of fact about a real situation. It will leave you on the verge of tears, (in my case actual tears), when Charlie confronts his grief and begins to come to grips with his tremendous loss. And that in fact the tragic reality is his guilt and loss has really never left him and he dealt with it in the only way he knew: denial. It will make you curse at the cold, unthinking actions of a young prosecutor trying to win his "case", (as I actually did at Charlie's hearing!) And it will make you smile at the commonsense of a old and wise, stern judge, (Donald Sutherland who is great at his short distinct role and gives the best performance of a wise, stern person in the legal profession since Wilford Brimley played an Assistant Attorney General in Absence of Malice.)
This movie was also amazing to me for a few other reasons: (1) I never looked at my watch once during the showing of the film. Which means it had me from the beginning to the end, (2) Although the cast was interracial, this fact was not important to the playing out of the roles of the characters in the film. Race was a non-factor to the performance of the roles in this movie. Amazing people can actually interact with out this fact being brought out! and (3) the only real reference to 9/11 is when Charlie's financial attorney refers to the tragedy of Charlie's loss as "what Charlie had become on 9/12". Time will be the true test of how this movie will stand out in the future but if the purpose of a movie is not to just entertain but to make one think and have that movie stay with you long after you leave the theatre then Reign Over Me succeeded phenomenally as far as I am concerned. I have not yet forgotten this wonderful thought provoking film and I will wait impatiently for the day I can purchase it as a DVD.


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