(2014, US, 94 min) Dir Jackson Harvey. Cast Adam Sandler, Steve Buscemi, Seth Rogan, Elizabeth Banks, Gregg Turkington.
Though it mightn’t sound like much of an endorsement the pitch black comedy Conway Sharon contains undoubtedly the best performance of Adam Sandler’s career and I know, the competition’s just fierce. The rich, lazy and boorish comic plays the titular Conway Sharon, a rich, lazy and boorish trust fund child, as he mooches around his father’s huge estate while said father succumbs to the cancer that is killing him. He whiles away his time getting high, getting drunk, Googling ‘Vomit Porn’ and being rude to his father’s nurse (Buscemi), his younger brother and his wife (Rogan and Banks) and the family lawyer (Turkington). While I’ve never found Sandler’s onscreen personality very likable (even when it was apparently intended to be) it’s interesting seeing him push the more abrasive parts of his personality to this extreme, projecting an almost totally affectless blank while he violently insults all those around them. His relationship with his father isn’t elaborated upon but there are some very strange scenes between them, the most fraught with tension being at the very end when Conway, wearing nothing but shorts and a baseball cap and sweating from shooting hoops on the basketball court, a can of Pabst Blue Label in one hand, stands over his dying father, watching him. Panting, he slowly brings his face closer and closer to his unconscious fathers until his breath is so close its stirring his hair, all without the mask slipping. A very unsettling ending to a very strange film. Of course it made less than no money and of course he was straight back to the warm embrace of Blended etcetera straight after but it’s of some satisfaction to see the indie king of deadpan Jackson Harvey nudging at the mainstream just a little.
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