How Don’t Say Good Luck redeems Millennial feminism
When Adam Sandler started his production-distribution deal with Netflix in 2016, he left behind the Hollywood studio system that couldn’t protect him from being barbarized by the woke media. That’s how we get Don’t Say Good Luck, a deeply likable musical comedy about high school teen Sophie Birenbaum (Sunny Sandler) who faces the difficulties of family and social life.
The feminist issues, ranging from gender to health, that plague Millennial culture are redeemed by Sophie’s adolescent maturation. She must come to terms with her personal desire to be a musical stage performer and with her mother Elizabeth’s (Melanie Lynskey) cancer diagnosis that disrupts the family. Don’t Say Good Luck is both ambitious and remarkable in the way it reflects these crises in Sophie’s efforts to perform in the school production of the Broadway musical Waitress.
As a vehicle for his daughter Sunny (who previously starred in the Netflix comedy You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah), this film extends Sandler’s usual ethnic observation with his lightest touch yet. Director Julia Hart balances ideas in the script that she co-wrote with Laura Hankin and Jordan Horowitz to achieve a truly cinematic stage-to-screen adaptation of a Broadway musical (unlike the recent transfers of Hamilton, Merrily We Roll Along, Hadestown, and Six). It’s also a credible realization of politicized gender trends. That’s because Adam Sandler, producing outside the liberal Hollywood silo, fully humanizes Sophie’s story.
The Birenbaum clan’s middle-class striving helps Sophie’s modern American multicultural sophistication feel true to a teen’s precarious hopes and regrets. Hart sets up simple scenes of Sophie’s home life that yield uncanny rapport with her parents, her best friend Carolyn (Scarlett Estevez), and their unexpected sexual tension and reacquaintance, and the schoolmates whose individual egos emerge during the show rehearsals. (“At least one of us is kissing the right person,” Sophie says of teenage performance anxiety.)
By affixing Waitress to Sophie’s life, the stage show becomes about much more than feminist preoccupation. Sophie sings the Sara Bareilles songs as her own personal expression. From tween pop to girl pop, Sunny and Bareilles lift the film above Taylor Swift–like smugness and the banal cheer of Katy Perry’s “Firework.” The pregnancy and lesbian metaphors implied by “she is all of this / mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie” complicate each female characterization — nearing the profundity of Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside.
Sunny Sandler’s innocence and honesty show us both the child and the developing woman — not a feminist ideal, but the individual, such as Francis Ford Coppola attempted with his daughter Sofia in The Godfather Part III. Yet nothing about the film’s insights feels forced. Hart’s casual revelations involve the nerdy Asian boy who never gets to rehearse a kiss, the caring grandfather (Steve Buscemi) who realizes he’s not the one to elicit a teenage girl’s confession, the school heartthrob Jack (Jack Champion) — a Zac Efron type who’s too good-looking for his own good — and the theater nerd who admires Sophie from backstage. They provide that humane amplitude that always gives Adam Sandler films their Jean Renoir quality.
Only outside the Hollywood bubble could Adam Sandler dare make a film that corrects current feminist self-righteousness — the white-female liberalism that, for example, shocked the nation last week with the signing of that abortion-up-to-birth bill in Massachusetts. Instead, Don’t Say Good Luck offers the movingly tender contradiction between Sophie and her mother, who recognize each other’s very different yet connected struggles. “I’m sorry you never found the thing that lit you up,” the daughter commiserates. And the mother lovingly answers, “But I did.” The sensitivity of these womanly experiences lets us know that these two individuals will never be without each other; this bold emotionalism goes beyond mere feminism. This doesn’t confirm that Adam Sandler is MAGA (or a “friend of Abe,” as Hollywood conservatives vouchsafe); Sophie and Elizabeth’s “women’s rights” cheer is simply a private wink without going too far into pink-pussy-hat protest or The Handmaid’s Tale madness.
When Sophie brings a performance of Waitress to her mother’s backyard, theater students will feel the yearning of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. Don’t Say Good Luck combines movie-musical structure with teen-movie richness. It succeeds where the miserable mixed-genre construct of La La Land failed. I had blasted La La Land’s producer Jordan Horowitz but gladly salute his partnership with Adam Sandler on this occasion.
