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Film
“Reign Over Me”: Don Cheadle and Jada Pinkett Smith Star in Story of Complex and Interwining Relationships and Friendship
posted on Mar 23, 2007
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| Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler star in Columbia Pictures' "Reign Over Me" |
Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle star in the Columbia Pictures drama, “Reign Over Me,” which opens March 23rd. Sandler plays a man who lost is family in the 9/11 attacks on New York, but when he rekindles the friendship with an old college roommate (Cheadle), it helps him get over his grief. Jada Pinkett Smith and Liv Tyler also star. Saffron Burrows, Donald Sutherland and the film’s writer-director Mike Binder co-star.
In the film, two former college roommates Charlie Fineman (Sandler) and Alan Johnson (Cheadle) run into each other years later and rekindle their friendship. Charlie, who recently lost his wife and children, has retreated from his life, while Alan is overwhelmed by his family and professional responsibilities. Their chance meeting becomes a lifeline for Charlie and Alan, both of whom are in need of a trusted friend at this pivotal moment in their lives.
At the center of the film is the relationship between Charlie Fineman and Alan Johnson. But the relationship between the characters surrounding them re intertwined in a complex web of friendship, recovery and reconciliation. Jada Pinkett Smith plays Alan Johnson’s stalwart and beautiful wife, Janeane Johnson. Liv Tyler is Angela Oakhurst, a young therapist whose earnest desire to help people may just be the stepping stone Charlie needs to help him on his way to recovery. And Saffron Burrows plays Donna Remar, a beautiful but troubled young woman who enters both Charlie's and Alan's lives in unexpected ways.
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| Jada Pinkett Smith in Columbia Pictures' "Reign Over Me" |
For Binder, the most important part of casting a film is finding actors whose response to the material stems from a deep emotional empathy with the characters. “I don’t want somebody to do a movie because of the money or because it would be a good career move,” he says. “I’m looking for actors who say, ‘Something about this part is touching me.’”
Key to portraying that on screen was Sandler’s relationship with Don Cheadle. From the moment the actors first got together, Binder knew the relationship would work. “They were over at my house – hanging out in the backyard – and you could see these two guys just liked each other,” he says. “They have a lot of similar qualities and interests. They’re both athletic, both talented musicians, both intelligent and talented guys. They had chemistry.”
For Cheadle, that chemistry is replayed between the characters in the film. “My character’s a mess and Adam’s character’s a mess,” he says. “It was interesting playing these two guys who need each other to figure things out, even if at the end of the film you’re still not necessarily sure what it is they’ve figured out. It’s not overly simplistic and that’s interesting.”
Though Charlie is the one with deep, profound issues, Alan is not without burdens of his own. “At the beginning of their relationship, Alan’s not trying to help Charlie – Alan’s trying to help Alan,” Cheadle continues. “He’s found an outlet, somebody he can kick it with – and he hasn’t had that for a long time. He needs that. He plays on the fact that Charlie is sick in order to get permission from his wife to spend more time with Charlie, but that has the unintended consequence of giving him some perspective on his own life, gratitude for what he has, and a rekindled affection for the people in his life.”
The problems that Alan faces are not the insurmountable, irreconcilable differences of two people who have grown apart, but merely a downturn in the cycle of a strong marriage. “Don’s character is in a good marriage. He’s just not showing up for it,” says Binder. “He needs some air but isn’t able to express this need. Inadvertently, his relationship with Charlie helps him do that. When Charlie and Alan go out at night, they’re not looking for affairs, or to get drunk and cause trouble – they just want to have fun like two innocent kids. It’s good to see adults just want to have a little fun and not looking for adult fixes.”
Though the relationship between Charlie and Alan is at the center of the film, the characters surrounding them show how changes in one life can have rippling affects upon the people around them. Jada Pinkett Smith understood that Alan’s wife, Janeane, had to be strong, but not overbearing. “I thought it was important to show her inner strength, but still make the character a woman who needs Alan to return – and who Alan needs to return to,” says Pinkett Smith. “It was an interesting balance. She’s very patient, she knows and loves her husband, and she believes they will get to a resolution.”
“Janeane has to be a strong woman – otherwise, you might ask, ‘Why is she letting him do all these things?’” says Binder. “But with the way they communicate, you get a better sense of what goes on at home. She’s not letting him get away with something. She’s enduring, tolerating as he goes through what he needs to go through.”
At a recent press junket for the film I got a chance to ask Cheadle and Pinkett Smith to talk a little about working opposite each other and what they felt the other brought to the table?
Cheadle said: “I had a great time working with Jada. We had a very collaborative relationship. The whole process with Adam, Liv, Jada and myself, Mike, it was a very collaborative effort, a real team effort. There wasn’t a day when we showed up on set where we just had a scene and we said, ‘Okay that’s the scene. Let’s go shoot it.’ We would always be talking about the nuances of the scene, the ways to get things out of it and kind of talking about our own relationships. ‘Okay, how does it down at your house? This is how it goes down at my house. How does it go down at your house so I can try to find the best way to realize this relationship?’ I’m on stage 8 and I came in and said, ‘I had this exact argument last night,’ and she said, ‘I did too.’ We just had that same beef at home with our loved ones so it just felt very real. It was real comfortable to work with Jada.”
Pinkett Smith concurred, “It was so easy,” she said. “Working with Don is just like, I don’t know, It was so easy. There’s a bathroom scene where Mike [Binder] said, ‘You guys just go in there and do something,’ and we created that scene on the day. It was just so natural and so easy.”
Columbia Pictures releases “Reign Over Me” nationwide on March 23rd.
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