THE WATERBOY
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Touchstone Pictures Director: Frank Coraci Writer: Tim Herlihy, Adam Sandler Cast: Adam Sandler, Fairuza Balk, Kathy Bates, Henry Winkler, Blake Clark, Allen Covert, Peter Dante, Jonathan Loughran, Dan Patrick, Jerry Reed
Those who can, play. Those who can't, manage. Those who can't manage, become assistant managers. In high schools around the country, kids who want to be part of their sports teams but just can't cut it become managers, often the butt of jokes by members of the team and by fellow students alike. They're called everything from waterboy to stuff that's unprintable in a family review. But vengeance is theirs in Frank Coraci's film, "The Waterboy," about a nerdy guy who proves that he can hew wood, draw water, and throw a mean tackle all at the same time. The difference here is that the waterboy is not a high-school kid but a 31-year-old who appears mentally challenged but who, in reality, has been kept out of school and away from girls by a backwater mama who is afraid of being deserted by her little boy as she was by her husband some time back.
How good can a movie be if it centers on a waterboy? Well, maybe you've heard the statement that critics like to throw around, "This movie is not resonant enough to be taken seriously and not stupid enough to be funny." No problem. This one really IS moronic enough to be entertaining and could inspire the fabulously successfully IDT publications to put out a "Dummies' Guide to Football." Nope, it probably would better meet the standard for "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Football." While lots of films have been dumbed down so that the lowest common denominator among moviegoers can enjoy (witness, for example, "A Night at the Roxbury"), the folks who put this one out could not possibly have THAT low an estimate of the audience, so we've got to assume--in the words of its star, Adam Sandler, that "We're just having fun and I hope everyone has fun right along with us." As one critic has said about the movie, "If you like the Chris Farley stuff, and if you're one of Adam Sandler's regular fan club, you'll have a rollicking good time. If not, stay away."
While the talented Mr. Sandler had a more intelligent role in "The Wedding Singer," this time he goes all out to be Thoreauvian, paring away all the complexities of life and becoming as simple as a human body can get. As the eponymous waterboy, Bobby Boucher, he speaks with a stutter and is the perfect student of his backwater mother's (Kathy Bates) homilies. He has never been with another woman, has no friends because (his mom insists) "he doesn't have social graces" and gets his fulfillment by taking the job of waterboy seriously enough to sterilize the H20 and to check it repeatedly for Ph content. His concern is not appreciated by the jocks he serves on a college football team. They spit in the water at best, and at worst take turns tackling him amid a flurry of insults, turning over the table on which he so carefully tends to his product.
One day, infuriated by yet another affront to his dignity cast at him by a member of the team, he dashes into the field tackling the offender so viciously that Coach Klein (Henry Winkler) puts him into a game, counsels him to visualize people who have humiliated him in the past, and turns him loose against some of the most brawny contenders south of the Mason-Dixon line. It's the sort of feel-good movie in which games are won in the final seconds and women swoon over their sportsman-heroes--in this case, the sexy, criminally inclined Vicki Vallencourt (Fairuza Balk) pushes her man to victory with a promise to introduce the 31-year-old to the mysterious of love.
Directed conventionally by Frank Coraci, the screenplay by Tim Herlihy and Adam Sandler has fun at the expense of the deep south, portraying the Louisiana Bayou country as a hillbilly heaven of snake-eaters and of folks with accents that not even a southerner could understand. Great fun is had at the expense of Farmer Fran (Blake Clark), who cannot utter a single understandable word and Mama Boucher (Kathy Bates) as a grasping, lonely woman who covers up her insecurities behind falsely fundamentalist religious convictions. Insisting that football (which she pronounces "foosball") is just plain silly and out of bounds for her boy and that Vicki Vallencourt is the Devil (she's on safer grounds there), she keeps Bobby locked into arrested development for her own selfish ends.
Henry Winkler turns in the best performance as the coach who is afraid of the other team's trainer until Bobby imparts to him the safe advice he received: to visualize the man you fear as though he were a baby, a cocker spaniel, or a guy who has mortified you in the past. It's a toned-down discharge of a role that the Fonz would have played as low comedy back in the seventies. Ms. Balk plays to type as the low-life girl friend much as she was in the quite different film, "American History X" in a movie whose quality is, well, as we said, dependent on what you think of the Adam Sandler genre.
Rated PG-13. Running Time: 86 minutes. (C) 1998 Harvey Karten
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