The Adam Sandler movie that Ingmar Bergman kept in his house
There are many instances of celebrities admiring unexpected celebrities. For example, Greta Gerwig is a huge fan of Sylvester Stallone. Steven Spielberg has voiced something akin to admiration for Michael Bay. And Larry David and Timothée Chalamet once had lunch together.
In the world of Hollywood, pretty much anything can happen. But how in the many multi-verses of the cosmos does it make sense that pioneering Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman had a thing for Adam Sandler? Known for making intensely complex dramas plumbing the depths of psychology and existentialism, Bergman is one of the greatest directors of all time. His movies often feel like an abstract crash course on psychoanalysis, and whether they’re dealing with fraught mother/daughter relationships or the increasingly blurred identities of a nurse and her patient, they make you contemplate the very nature of the human psyche.
The same has never been said of Adam Sandler, whose many (some might say too many) contributions to cinema include broad, mildly offensive comedies like Jack and Jill, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, and Grown Ups 2. You could possibly conceive of Sandler being a fan of Bergman, in the same way that a primary school drama teacher might grudgingly appreciate the work of Daniel Day-Lewis, but Bergman liking Sandler seems like a decidedly niche April Fool’s joke.
However, we have it on good authority (Greta Gerwig), that there was at least one Sandler movie that the Swedish auteur owned. During a directors’ roundtable with The Hollywood Reporter in 2023, the Barbie director revealed that she had visited Bergman’s home on the remote Swedish island of Faro and seen the evidence with her own eyes.
When Bergman’s name was brought up during the conversation, Gerwig said, “I have gone to his house in Faro. It’s a thing to see. There are so many amazing things. But one thing is on the back of his office door, he rated every single month of his relationship with Liv Ullmann, even after they were divorced. Some months got a heart and some months got a devil. Also, he has the VHS of Anger Management in his house.”
In response to Bradley Cooper’s obvious disbelief, she said, “Yeah. He also has other things, but he has Anger Management. I loved to think of Ingmar Bergman being like, ‘Play.’”
Anger Management is a 2003 comedy starring Sandler as a man with anger issues who becomes a client of an unorthodox therapist played by Jack Nicholson. Some critics said it was Sandler’s best movie since The Wedding Singer, which was tantamount to panning it. Still, one could imagine, perhaps, that after decades of exploring the confounding intricacies of the human psyche, Bergman might have enjoyed kicking back and watching a film about psychoanalysis so two-dimensional that even he would struggle to find underlying vestigates of psychological entanglement at the end.
Still, it’s surprising that, of all Sandler’s films, Bergman didn’t have a copy of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love at his island home. It was, by far, the most interesting exploration of Sandler’s talents before Bergman’s death in 2007 and a film he would almost certainly have appreciated.
