Why did Adam Sandler's new film 'Don't Say Good Luck' bring me to tears? - opinion

Adam Sandler has a new movie on Netflix. He doesn’t star in it – he’s one of the producers – but it features his daughter, Sunny, in the lead role.

My wife, Jody, and I have been big fans of Sandler’s less slapstick turns – he was hilarious in You’re So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (also on Netflix) and should have been nominated for an Oscar for his acting in Uncut Gems, not to mention his serious role in Punch Drunk Love.

So Jody and I were eager to see his latest, Don’t Say Good Luck, in which high school sophomore Sophie snags the lead in a musical called Waitress. The music is more 13 than Sondheim, but Sara Bareilles’s tunes are a joy to listen to. 

The script, acting, and music are all top-notch, and the run-time is short (just an hour and a half). The movie is billed as a “coming of age” story. 

So, why was I crying like a baby through half the movie?

Apparently, I didn’t read the plot synopsis carefully enough in advance, because Don’t Say Good Luck is a tender, if occasionally obvious, weepy film. 

Sophie’s Gen X hippie-adjacent mother, Elizabeth, played with a bucolic effortlessness by Melanie Lynskey, has an unnamed cancer that’s too far advanced for treatment.

Sophie’s father, Ted, has a bad habit of butt-dialing his daughter

Sophie’s parents try to hide the news from her and her twin brothers, but Sophie’s father, Ted, has a bad habit of butt-dialing his daughter at the most inopportune times. Sophie hears the doctor tell her parents the bad news, along with their shocked, sobbing response.

Sophie alternates between trying to be a regular teenager – a “theater kid” with all the usual crushes on the wrong boys – while at the same time not wanting to leave her mother’s side as she declines.

I’ve seen plenty of films where a major character is suffering from cancer, but there was something so natural about Lynskey and Sandler’s performances that I felt I was watching a close friend or loved one – or, more on the nose, I was watching myself.

Indeed, I deteriorated almost as quickly as Elizabeth last year before a last-gasp treatment – the miraculous CAR-T – stopped my cancer in its unforgiving tracks. This year, I’ve been dealing with all manner of new ailments: gallstones, a questionable liver, chronic bladder inflammation, a tortuous bowel obstruction.

But that’s not why I couldn’t stop crying.

What kind of quality of life have I had these past two years? 

When one of the twins asks, “We’re still going to the beach house this summer, right?” Mom responds, “Of course, honey.” Elizabeth so desperately wants to live.

That triggered something in me: I do, too.

Want to live, that is.

LAST YEAR, when the first attempts at engineering my CAR-T cells failed, and the clinical trial my hematologist tried to sign me up for flunked me out for having COVID, I was probably no more than two weeks away from dying.

And now I’m back in the same place: if the medical team hadn’t noticed how severely malnourished I’d become and started me on TPN (IV nutrition), I’d surely be dead before this piece could be published.

Moreover, what kind of quality of life have I had these past two years? What will it be like going forward? If I can’t do half the things that used to fire up my dopamine receptors, is it still worth fighting? Sure, my brain is fine, but I’d like to think I’m more than my ability to pontificate.

After seeing how painful Elizabeth’s descent is on her daughter Sophie, though, I know I don’t want that for my kids. And I don’t want that for me. Not yet.

I know I’ll never get back to 100% of my former self, and probably not 80% either. But 60% is better than the 30% I’m holding at today.

If I had gotten sick like this in my 20s, with a good 50 to 60 years left, presumably, these questions would be mostly moot. What’s a year or two to recover when you’ve got your whole life in front of you?

When you’re staring down your own mortality, though, even if that’s still 10 or 15 years away, what you choose to do and who you choose to do it with takes on a painful poignancy.

Would it be prudent to eschew all those exotic third-world countries still on my travel bucket list, where the wrong food or a mysterious virus could knock me silly and where the medical systems are dicey? Is it time to trade Jakarta for Japan? Thailand for Taipei?

A friend told me about how his father got sick while visiting Israel from North America. He was hospitalized for months here and had to be transported home on a medically assisted flight. He spent months in a rehab facility but eventually recuperated fully.

He then died two years later.

Does that suggest I should take more precautions, or the opposite, and do what I want because you never know when the clock will unexpectedly run out?

“Don’t say good luck,” Sophie tells her mom before she heads off to the audition that lands her the lead role in the play. Or maybe she’s foreshadowing her mother’s experience. When you’re fighting cancer, someone cheerily wishing you “good luck” seems incautious at best.

I’d like to believe my re-energized will-to-live is not just dumb luck, but the result of considered choices and considerable willpower.

Currently cancer-free, surrounded by friends and family and a career I love despite a host of genuine discomforts, my life has played out a bit like the song title from the band Third Eye Blind – it’s truly been a “semi-charmed life.”■

The writer’s book, TOTALED: The Billion-Dollar Crash of the Startup that Took on Big Auto, Big Oil and the World, was published earlier this year as an audiobook. It is available on Amazon and other online booksellers in print, eBook and 
Audible formats. brianblum.com