Recent reports out of Hollywood indicate that Adam Sandler, of Grown Ups 2 fame, will be filming a version of Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel The Bell Jar to be released next summer. Sandler will play both Doctor Nolan, the head of the mental asylum, and in a radical reinterpretation of the source material, will don a fat suit and cross-dress in order to play Esther Greenwood, the troubled and suicidal protagonist. Sandler’s long time flunky, Rob Schneider, will play a character expressly created for the film: an Indian mail room attendant named Gopal Vindaloo who yells his famous catchphrase, “Very please to give you mail.”
Sandler was ebullient about the film, stating “it’ll be a laugh riot. We want to make it fun, we want to make something you can bring the whole family to. Bring your kids, bring your wife, they’re all welcome.” As a result, some of the more troublesome scenes in the novel have been excised in order to make room for a subplot in which Esther is romanced by a shy, rotund IRS agent played by Kevin James. Sandler, who has been working with a $150 million budget for the film, indicated that the money had been spent wisely. “We had the cash, so we went to Maui to film. Saw some dolphins, me and the whole crew had fun. Jen[nifer Aniston], Chris[topher Walken], Nelly, everyone.”
Although many literary critics have been reticent to justify a reinterpretation of such a seminal literary work, early reviews have been positive. Pulitzer Prize winning critic Wesley Morris stated that, “Never before have I laughed so much at the presentation of mental illness,” while St. Jude Times-Picayune writer Andrew Ellis went even farther, saying, “This movie is brilliant, if only because I did not know who Sylvia Plath was before seeing the film.”
