After the several documentaries and pseudo-documentaries about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, including World Trade Center and United 93, Mike Binder's decision to turn some of the material into the background for an offbeat bourgeois domestic drama suggests at least a new approach to a terrible catastrophe. Without really dwelling on the event itself, Reign Over Me examines the aftermath of 9/11 through its consequences for one individual and, secondarily, on a few people whose lives intersect with his.

Although the movie superficially revolves around the situation of Charlie Fineman (Adam Sandler), whose wife and daughters died in one of the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center, his friend Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle) really propels the action. A rich, successful Park Avenue dentist, Cheadle suffers from an overload of responsibility, which includes his cranky mother and terminally ill father, his demanding wife, and a couple of spoiled daughters. He also finds a certain unease in the shallowness of his work and the duplicity of his colleagues.

Just as his anxieties reach a crisis, he accidentally encounters an old friend, his former roommate in dental school, Charlie Fineman. The tragedy of 9/11 had robbed Charlie of his normal life, driving him into a kind of emotional and intellectual numbness. Supported by insurance and government payments, protected by an accountant friend and a kindly landlady, Charlie roams the city on a motor scooter, plays solitary video games in his large, empty apartment, and obsessively refurbishes his kitchen.

When Alan connects with Charlie, he discovers some useful purpose in his life beyond stifling domesticity and professional discontent, an incentive to selfless action. Despite Charlie's recalcitrance, he gradually renews their friendship, hauling him back into a semblance of social adjustment, persuading him to consult a therapist. Charlie's post traumatic stress disorder, however, impels him into a number of antisocial acts, including a suicide attempt, bringing the relationship and the tragedy to a point of crisis.

While the picture demonstrates Alan's generosity of spirit in his attempts to help his friend, it also suggests some reciprocity in the relationship. When Charlie keeps Alan out all night at a Mel Brooks marathon or entices him into playing his favorite video game all night, Alan's wife (Jada Pinkett Smith) realizes that Alan in a way envies his troubled friend. Charlie's freedom and irresponsibility reveal to the staid, repressed, unfulfilled dentist a vision of a life he had never known, an alternative possibility whose existence he had never suspected.

No doubt because of Adam Sandler's typical roles, as with The Upside of Anger, Mike Binder mixes a good deal of comedy with the sadness of Reign Over Me. Further like The Upside of Anger, it also mixes a good deal of improbability with its attempt to represent some aspects of a genuine human situation. The director settles for a much too neat and pat resolution to all the conflicts and difficulties that confront his characters, so that his conclusion rather depletes the emotional energy the film initially creates.

Although he must play a foil to Adam Sandler, Don Cheadle conveys considerable emotional range with some very small effects, suggesting the controlled desperation of an ostensibly successful man, the classic angst-ridden bourgeois professional. Surprisingly, Adam Sandler manages his role with genuine conviction; looking rather like a handsome Bob Dylan and acting rather like a slightly more normal Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, he never attempts to evoke any false emotion from the audience, earning every bit of sympathy on his own.

As it follows Charlie's journeys on his motor scooter, the movie lovingly reflects the diversity of a dozen Manhattan neighborhoods, from Times Square to Greenwich Village, with the usual shots of the skyline. It returns again and again to certain establishing shots --- Alan Johnson's Park Avenue offices, his ritzy apartment house, a number of familiar streets, as if the director somehow ran out of ideas for connections and transitions. Everything in the picture, ultimately, looks just a bit too slick and shiny, the Hollywood notion of New York as an antiseptic abode for the wealthy and successful, underlining its intermittently disappointing sense of plausibility.

Reign Over Me(R), written and directed by Mike Binder, is now playing at area theaters.