When it comes to comedy, there aren’t many people who only work with Adam Sandler once. The actor and producer has gathered together a tight-knit group of on and off-camera talents who collaborate with him on countless projects spanning years and even decades, so there’s a high chance that You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah director Sammi Cohen is going to be the latest welcomed into the inner circle.
While the Netflix original’s score may have dropped from a perfect Rotten Tomatoes ranking of 100 percent, the film is still carrying a mightily impressive 92 percent approval rating from critics, and you’d be happy to bet your house on Happy Madison’s latest team-up with the streaming service being the number one movie on the platform by this time tomorrow.
For Cohen, this marks her first time as part of the regular troupe, and almost the entire Sandler clan is on board this time around with Adam being joined by wife Jackie, as well as daughters Sunny and Sadie as part of the ensemble cast. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the filmmaker couldn’t speak highly enough of the family dynamic both onscreen and off.
“It’s kind of this magic. I don’t think I’ll ever experience something quite like this [again]. It’s almost surreal because, first off, the Sandlers just made me a part of the family. I never felt like the outsider, I never felt like a guest. And what’s incredible to watch is they do that with community. I think community and family are such pillars of being a Jewish person, and the Sandlers have this way of really making everyone feel like family and feel at home. And there’s this sense of ease and show up as you are. When you feel like you’re around family, you can just be more yourself. And that, I think, elicits just funnier jokes and there’s less of a filter on everything. You can kind of just drop your shoulders and relax and have fun.
Adam is doing everything right. He’s producing, he’s acting, he’s being a dad. The whole family — him, the girls, Jackie — they’re all really talented and they are the most hardworking group of people I think I’ve ever met. And Sadie and Sunny in particular were really interested in the filmmaking…. The cast of kids as a whole, some of them want to be writers and directors, and that was just a fun thing too, to see and help foster that kind of creative itch as well.”
Much more than a self-indulgent exercise in getting his kids into the family business, then, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah is well on course to going down in the history books as one of Sandler’s best-ever efforts regardless of genre, a development almost nobody could have seen coming given the outfit’s track record.