From Adam Sandler to Melissa McCarthy: Why comedians excel in straight dramatic roles

Sandler has received the best reviews of his career for ‘Uncut Gems’. Geoffrey Macnab understands why actors known for goofy comedies are tempted into heavyweight drama

Oscar contender? Sandler in ‘Uncut Gems’ (Netflix)

It will be a travesty if Adam Sandler isn’t Oscar nominated for his astonishing performance in Uncut Gems, the new feature from Josh and Benny Safdie. The film itself is a throwback: a contemporary equivalent to those seething, gritty, naturalistic New York-set street dramas of the Seventies and Eighties made by Sidney Lumet, often with Al Pacino in the leading role. Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a jewel dealer seemingly determined to live as chaotic and frenzied a life as possible. He is a low-life hustler, hugely in debt but still gambling at every opportunity and trying throughout the movie to sell a rare African opal to NBA star, Kevin Garnett. He is devoted to his wife and family, although he is also having a torrid affair with one of his employees. Ratner betrays everyone but has a charm that allows him to get away with it. From a religious Jewish background, he is a strange mix of sleaze and boyish innocence.

The Safdie brothers’ nervous intensity as filmmakers matches that of their protagonist, who can’t stay still for a moment. Cinematographer Darius Khondji shoots hand-held to add to the film’s giddy, disorienting feel. Sandler, now a veteran at 53, may be best known for goofy comedies such as Happy Gilmore and The Waterboy, but his performance in Uncut Gems takes method acting to places that Pacino and Robert De Niro in their prime might have struggled to reach. Unlike such stars, he has no sense of personal dignity. This means that when, say, his enemies strip him naked and throw him in the trunk of a car, he accepts the humiliation as just another inconvenience and quickly moves on.

As in last year’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, featuring Melissa McCarthy as literary forger Lee Israel, the comedians are playing characters not too far removed from their usual screen types. McCarthy’s Lee is sarcastic, witty and outrageous, just like the women she plays in all those Paul Feig comedies from Bridesmaids (2011) to Spy (2015). She is also a seedy and pathetic alcoholic. Moments that would be played for laughs in the Feig films have a grim and even tragic undertow. Sandler’s Ratner in Uncut Gems is yet another variation on the comedian’s everyman outsider, squaring up to a hostile world. The difference is that the Safdies bring as much violence and darkness to their storytelling as they do humour.

Sandler has taken on “serious” projects before, for example his turn (nominated for a Golden Globe) as the lonely businessman in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002), or his recent part as the middle-aged loser, desperate to impress his father in Noah Buambach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (2018). However, Uncut Gems has a demented energy those films lack.

There are obvious reasons why comedians excel in straight dramatic roles. They have excellent timing and know just how to engage the sympathies of an audience, even when they are playing low-lives and chancers. They’re physically robust, good at pratfalls and able to roll with the punches. They often have a soulful quality, too.

You will find silent cinema comedy legend Buster Keaton popping up late in his career in surprising places. For instance, he was the lead (although his dolorous face is hardly seen) in Film (1965), an experimental short scripted by Samuel Beckett, and he played a gloomy Hollywood old-timer in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). Lily Tomlin is a stand-up comedian who later made a name as a film actor in movies directed by Robert Altman and Robert Benton. Critics often grumbled that Robin Williams, as one put it, “can insufferably crank the energy to 11”, after being exposed to yet more of his maudlin, madcap comedies. And yet Williams proved to be a sensitive and relatively restrained presence in dramas such as Dead Poets Society (1989) and Good Will Hunting (1997).

More recently, comic actors Steve Carell and Ben Stiller have given formidable character performances in such films as Foxcatcher (2014) and Greenberg (2010), while Steve Coogan excelled as crusading journalist, Martin Sixsmith, in Stephen Frears’ Philomena (2013).

Even so, filmmakers remain wary about casting comedians and comic actors in roles too far from type. If they are well known, the public may not accept it when they start trying to play Hamlet or appearing in stories touching on heavy social and political subject matter.

You can understand, though, why comedians are often so desperate to reinvent themselves. Sandler has turned out a steady stream of box-office hits over the past 20 years but must be sick of all those reviews mocking his “moronic” and “grossly offensive” farces. It remains extremely rare for comedies to receive awards nominations. They are intended to make audiences laugh and, perhaps for this reason, critics don’t treat them with respect.

Ironically, while comedians are too often spurned, “serious” actors regularly win plaudits for playing comedians. Laurence Olivier was acclaimed for combining “physical bravura and deep despair” as fading, end of the pier, music hall comedian, Archie Rice, in the stage and film versions of John Osborne’s The Entertainer. Maxine Peake received similar praise when she played a female comedian, performing her expletive-filled routines in working men’s clubs in Funny Cow (2017). Joaquin Phoenix justifiably received a rapturous response for his bravura performance as the (very unfunny) clown and stand-up earlier this year in The Joker.

Comedians, meanwhile, tend to receive far more favourable reviews in films that reveal the darker side of their world than when they’re actually trying to be funny. Jerry Lewis may have been revered by the French for zany comedies such as The Nutty Professor (1963), but much of his work was dismissed by British and American critics as “pointless” and “witless”. However, when Lewis played Jerry Langford, a famous comedian and late-night TV show host kidnapped by manic fan Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1982), his performance was admired precisely because it was so far from his goofy antics in his own star vehicles. Instead of humour, it is dismay and exasperation he shows as he is tormented by Pupkin.

Lewis used to take occasional roles in “serious” dramas – see his guilt-ridden Arizona car dealer in Emir Kusturica’s Arizona Dream (1993). He also co-wrote, directed and starred in the unreleased Holocaust drama, The Day the Clown Cried (1972), about a German circus clown, Helmut Doork, who accompanies Jewish children to their death at Auschwitz. “I went to Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz. I saw the killing camps, the sprinklers which unleaded Zyklon B, and I saw the nail scratchings on the walls; the initials, the writings,” Lewis wrote in his autobiography of his research for the ill-fated project. He recreated the death camps in a Swedish military compound. The film had financial and legal problems, which stopped it reaching cinemas. “One way or another, I’ll get it done,” Lewis vowed in the early Eighties but he was, by then, obviously very wary about breaking taboos. The film hadn’t been completed by the time of its director’s death in 2017 and it isn’t clear it ever will be. His fellow comedian Roberto Benigni won Oscars for his Holocaust-themed Life is Beautiful (1997), but this is subject matter that generally defies comic interpretation.

Sandler has received the best reviews of his career for Uncut Gems. It makes a pleasant change for an actor more accustomed to being nominated for Razzies for making some of the worst films of recent times. However, the success will pose him a dilemma. The former Saturday Night Live star must decide whether to continue trying to carve out a new career as a method performer or whether to go back to the family movies and inane romcoms that bring so many critics out in hives. With Netflix behind him, he can do whatever he wants. Murder Mystery, the comedy released earlier this summer in which he co-starred with Jennifer Aniston, received yet more negative reviews but still reached record numbers of viewers on the streaming platform. Whatever turn his career now takes, in Uncut Gems, the comedian gives a blistering performance, one that is easily a match for anything else from any “serious” actor in awards contention this year.

Uncut Gems is released on 10 January