Fandlers get more of the Sandler Clandler in Don’t Say Good Luck (now on Netflix), a Sunny Sandler vehicle beneath her dad’s surprisingly increasingly diverse Happy Madison Productions banner. The production company’s longstanding Netflix deal has found it significantly branching out from the comedy dipshittery of so many Adam Sandler flix; we used to exclusively get chuckleheaded dreck like The Ridiculous 6 and The Wrong Missy, now we’re privy to relatively sturdier fare like Hustle and Sunny’s breakout You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah in between Happy Gilmore and Grown-Ups sequels. Julia Hart (I’m Your Woman) directs this heavier-on-the-dram-than-the-edy dramedy that wisely banks on the tender interactions between Sunny and co-star Melanie Lynskey.
The Gist: The setting is a fairly realistically cluttered family home. A little overdressed maybe, but I’ve seen worse. Sophie Birenbaum (Sunny Sandler) accidentally burns herself with her curling iron—and on the day of her high school musical audition. Frick! But it probably won’t matter; if she’s good enough, she’ll land a supporting role in Waitress and be happy. Her dad Ted (Max Greenfield) owns and runs a deli where Jon Lovitz is The Bagel Guy; she has two little brothers who might be twins and might not and aren’t fleshed-out enough as characters for us to tell or care; and her mom Elizabeth (Lynskey), does she work or help out at the deli or what? Dunno. Details, schmetails.
But Elizabeth has plenty to do in the movie, because Her Cancer Is Back. And Sophie learns about this in a terrible way at an inopportune time, milliseconds before the audition, when her dad accidentally butt-dials her just in time for the doc to drop the bad news. Tears in her eyes, Sophie takes the stage and kills it all to absolute death, and gets the lead role. That means the meanish girl will play second fiddle to the reserved and sensitive, but reasonably confident Sophie. Oh, and Sophie will have to kiss the hunky floppy-haired co-star, Jack (Jack Champion), who she crushes on from afar, but it’s only like pretend kissing, although she inevitably makes it a literal lick or two more real. Yeah. Cringe.
As Elizabeth wrestles with the worst possible news about her condition, she and Ted decide to protect the kids from the truth—the boys are still young, and the musical is such a big deal for Sophie, she doesn’t need the distraction. Elizabeth’s condition deteriorates to the point where her parents, Steve Buscemi as the sweet grandpa and Bebe Neuwirth as the complicated and slightly overbearing grandma, move in to help out. Meanwhile, Sophie awkwardly gets drunk at a party, awkwardly tries to endear herself to Jack and awkwardly gets through rehearsals, where the director, Ms. Parker (Stephanie Beatriz), sees the proverbial golden “It” deep within this fairly timid girl. Will Elizabeth be well enough to see her daughter sing her guts out for the world to see? Will pain make her performance that much more profound? Will we be blubbering snot into hankies by the time the credits roll? NO SPOILERS.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Be grateful this film doesn’t have the overbearing Sparksness of another nepo-kid-who-can-sing-and-is-starring-in-a-movie-about-a-dying-parent, namely, the Miley Cyrus vehicle The Last Song.
Performance Worth Watching: Here’s another reminder that the right role will put Lynskey on the Oscar ballot one of these days.
Sex And Skin: None.
Our Take: Don’t Say Good Luck is kind of a junk-drawer screenplay: Here’s a coming-of-age story, here’s a theater-kid triumph, here’s a weepie, have Jon Lovitz and Bebe Neuwirth been in anything lately?, and hey, we all like Waitress, right? The sentimental silver dollar banging about in the drawer is the sweet mother-daughter relationship between Lynskey and Sandler. It’s the only reasonably distinctive thing about a film that’s content to poke around in a few lightly meaningful thematic puddles without fully committing to making us laugh or cry or making us cry so hard we laugh or laugh so hard we cry. The butt-dial-from-Dad plot device/recurring gag is reflective of the film’s lack of writerly ambition. It’s also hard to ignore the prevailing notion that the film plays like a talent reel for the myriad abilities of a very famous funnyguy’s daughter via that very famous funnyguy’s production company.
But all elephant-in-the-room nepotism aside (at least it’s not the egregious Shyamalan showcase that was Trap), Sunny Sandler can sing very well, and ably finds the sweet spot in the Venn diagram of comedy and drama as an actor. The latter applies to Lynskey too, of course. When the material inevitably flounders, one or both of them lean into the earnest tones that push us out of our indifference toward the familiarity of this story, its characters, and its themes. It really has nothing new or compelling to say about problematic teenage life or mortality. The only thing that lingers after the credits roll is the gently sweet aftertaste of its leads’ chemistry.
Our Call: And that gentle sweetness is just enough to say STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
