THE QUEST FOR THE MOST ’90s FILM OF ALL TIME
Happy Gilmore

At one point in the mid-’90s, my brother and I were conducting entire conversations through Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison dialogue. There’s something about discovering comedy in your teenage years that lends itself to these recitations; if you haven’t figured out how to be funny yet for yourself, you can at least shamelessly mimic people you think are funny. After one too many “go to your homes” and “warm glass of shut-the-hell-ups,” however, my dad had had enough.

He broke it to us like this: “That movie is not that good, okay? This whole thing is getting old. You’re acting like it’s the best movie ever or something, and it’s not. It’s not the best anything. Get over it.” Right now I’m in the exact middle between my age then and my dad’s age then, and my opinion on Happy Gilmore is similarly split: it still holds up, mostly due to nostalgia, but there’s also no way it’s the best anything.


“That movie’s not that good, okay? And you’re not as good at basketball as you think you are, okay? And you have a bad sense of direction that makes me nervous when I let you drive, okay? And your interest in the arts has me worried that you’re gay, okay? And you mispronounce ‘ethereal’, okay?”

STARS/PERFORMANCES-
- Actors Who Are Unquestionably Tied to the Decade- Adam Sandler [+10]
From 1996 to 1998, I went from having an automatic kinship to people who loved Adam Sandler to having an automatic disapproval of people who loved Adam Sandler. Happy Gilmore was the favorite movie of an innocent kid; The Waterboy was the least favorite movie of a budding elitist.  I’m finishing Live From New York, Tom Shales and Jim Miller’s massive oral history of Saturday Night Live, and I don’t think I was alone. Discussing the Sandler years, all the interview subjects say something to the effect of: “I loved him. He was great. Adam was a mensch. But, you know, I did suspect the show was getting less political/adult/smart.” I seem to have been making those same connections in my head as a teenager.

I won’t deny that Sandler’s career has been fascinating though. Like no one else, he has mixed condescending brand-management (Grown Ups, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, The Waterboy) with genuinely interesting choices (Punch-Drunk Love, Reign Over Me, Spanglish) that no one forced him to make. Sometimes he’ll mix whimsy and cynicism in the same picture, as he did with The Wedding Singer. Put it this way: His arrested development is such that his most emotionally-mature work of the last five years is one in which he can stop time with a remote control.

In what feels like the most pure of those condescending brand-managements, Sandman plays the titular man-child, whose love affair with hockey and his grandmother are related in a faux-Super 8 home movie introduction [+3]. Despite knowing “the secret” to a powerful slapshot, Happy’s hot-headedness keeps him from securing a spot on a hockey team, then he goes home and gets dumped by his girlfriend. (The only scene we get of this poorly-drawn girlfriend is the pressing-elevator-buttons-with-a-duffel-bag-slung-over-her-shoulder moment, the “good-bye, Happy. I can’t waste my time with a loser” treatment. Women! [+3]) Then, to make matters worse, Happy’s grandmother’s house—which was built with his grandpa’s own hands [+1]—is being repossessed by the IRS because she “hasn’t paid her taxes in ten years.”

(So she deserves to have her house taken away from her, right? Not to be mean or anything.)

- Other Notable Actors/Characters- [+15]- Carl Weathers, Christopher McDonald, Julie Bowen, Frances Bay, Richard Kiel, Ben Stiller
Happy’s grandmother is played by Frances Bay, an old-lady character actress who was immortal until last year. While Happy struggles to pay the back-taxes, she has to stay in a nursing home run by a manic and uncredited Ben Stiller.


I remember my dad asking who Stiller was in the theater, and I told him: “He’s famous. I don’t really know why.”

Happy ends up with a reluctant plan when he accidentally finds that he can translate his slapshot motions into long drives on a golf course. He is mentored by Carl Weathers’ Chubbs, a golf pro with a wooden hand. (Sandler, co-writer Tim Herilhy, and uncredited rewriter Judd Apatow have an affinity for the grotesque, in the true, southern gothic sense of the word.) It isn’t long before Happy is matched against McDonald’s Shooter McGavin, the bourgeois spoiler, for the sanctity of golf, the hearts of fans, and the hand of a big-haired Julie Bowen [+1]. But you already knew that, didn’t you? I mean, what else were you watching in 1996? Evita? Shine? Marvin’s Room?

TECHNOLOGY/CULTURAL RELICS
- Could the Plot Reasonably Occur with Current Technology?
Sure. Holler at TurboTax though, Happy’s Grandma [-10].

The events of Happy Gilmore take place in a pre-Tiger Woods golf world, which is worth mentioning. Not that Woods brought the same type of irreverence to the game that Happy does, but he did bring new blood. It’s actually hard to imagine golf without the spectacle of Tiger.

References/Artifacts
Happy Gilmore is full of product placement [+3], including the old corporate identity of Subway. How did we ever put up with untoasted subs and so much brown in the logos? In addition to Subway, the Motorola logo gets a lot of screen time, which doesn’t make much sense given the number of landlines present [+3].


See, look how gross that looks. It’s just cold meat slapped onto white bread. I can make that at home, fam.

In his bedroom, Happy hangs pennants for NHL teams that no longer exist—shout-out to the Whalers [+2]. There are also a lot of golf celebrity cameos—shout to Verne Lundquist that I hate his guts and want him to die [+3].

- Hacking/Computers

It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed a movie with some serious hacking. I’ll have to keep that in mind.

FASHION

Bare midriff, flannel, snapbacks, Timberlands, cutoffs, Zubaz [+6]. Double-breasted jackets, light-wash jeans, baggy sweatpants, denim jackets, dress shirts open to t-shirts [+5].

’90s FILM CONVENTIONS

“Gimme a beer,” Rather Than Actually Naming a Brand Like a Normal Person [+1]

Five Separate Montages [+15]
1. “Happy’s Playing Well!” (music cue: HOUSE OF PAIN- “JUMP AROUND” [+10])
2. “Happy’s Moving Up the Ranks!” (music cue: “Money” [+1])
3. “Happy’s Playing Goonie Golf to Find Himself!”
4. “Happy’s Playing in an Intense Final Tournament!” (music cue: “Rock and Roll, Part 2” [+1]) 
5. “Happy’s Coming Back!”


I haven’t said much about the unforgettable Shooter, so let this photo speak for me, since it shows up three or four times in a “happy gilmore sandler” image search.

OTHER

In what seems like a weird, ego-fueled choice, director Dennis Dugan cast himself as the director of the PGA. He has quite a few scenes and isn’t terrible, but it seems as if someone else could have played the role better.

Watching Happy Gilmore as an adult, what I liked most were the tiny absurdist touches that interrupted what is basically a straight-ahead high-concept comedy. For example, the thirty-second hold on the zamboni driver singing “Endless Love” to himself. Or the random lady who gets hit by a car, then shows up an hour later to get hit by a falling air conditioner unit. Those moments pre-dated a lot of the Adult Swim-style comedy that dominates college dorm rooms today, and they seem alien to the middle-aged Sandler.

FINAL TALLY

Early Sandler is good for 73 points and a quick hour-and-a-half. Next time I’ll be reassessing AIDS drama  Philadelphia.