As someone who has never much liked Adam Sandler – neither in his “Saturday Night Live” days, nor in his early and infantile film roles as Billy Madison or Happy Gilmore, nor in his later exercises in self-indulgence such as “Mr. Deeds” or “Anger Management” – I am reluctant to admit it, but he seems to be a more serious person than I had thought.

In fact, he now seems to me to be crafting a body of work which is designed as an answer to one of the central questions of our existence and one of particular interest to me: What does it mean to be a good man?

Robert Bolt commented on Thomas More, his subject in “A Man for All Seasons,” that he was a “good” man not just in the moral sense but good in the way we mean when we say a knife is a “good” knife. That is, he was good at being what a man is for. I’ve never been quite sure what he meant by that, but I was reminded of it by Mr. Sandler’s new movie, “Spanglish.” I didn’t much like it, and I still don’t much like Mr. Sandler, but his is a comic exploration of Bolt’s territory.

Though it was directed by James L. Brooks, the comic intelligence behind much of “The Simpsons” as well as such amusing movies as “As Good As It Gets” and “Broadcast News,” one senses the massive presence at the movie’s center of Mr. Sandler, whose gravitational field is so powerful that nothing can escape it. Thus, although the movie purports to be a portrait of the marriage between his character, super-chef John Clasky, and Deborah (Tea Leoni), we never have a sense of Deborah as a person. Her function is life is to be an annoyance to her husband and children.

This is also supposed to be a movie about an affair, or the possibility of an affair, between John and the family’s Mexican nanny, Flor (Paz Vega). But even though Flor has a life of her own, especially in relation to her daughter, Cristina (Shelbie Bruce), she scarcely has an independent existence. Flor is simply a foil to Deborah, good where she is bad, perfect for John where Deborah is hopelessly wrong.

Among the film’s faults are a confusing sense of time and chronology. Flor seems to go from complete incomprehension of English to fluency in a couple of weeks while the family is staying at a beach house in Malibu.

But then the title is also misleading. There is a mention of the subject of the interaction of Hispanic and Anglo cultures in California, but then the subject is quietly dropped. Nor does it matter here that, by employing an illegal alien, John misses his chance to become secretary of Homeland Security. All the wider world is reduced to an appendage to John’s moral paradigm.

Or, more accurately, Mr. Sandler’s. For here his character is the same it has been in every movie since at least “The Wedding Singer.”

You know him, I’m sure. He’s a shy, sensitive type who loves women and children and is generally loved by them, though he is often wronged by a particular woman with selfish or ambitious tendencies. He himself is a modest and unassuming man who likes to laugh and make jokes and who doesn’t care about money or success – though one to whom money and success seem to come effortlessly.

In short, what we’re dealing with here is the classic American “nice guy” – except that he doesn’t finish last. But he must in nearly every case react in some way to a challenge to his manhood, often with violence.

In “Spanglish,” the challenge is one of self-denial, which argues that this new and updated Man of Honor for a postmodern, post honor culture may be maturing at last.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to make maturity cinematically sexy. This is a comedy that just isn’t very funny and that has one character, Ms. Leoni’s Deborah, who is way too big for it. She is so much more interesting to most people than the perfectly good John and the perfectly good Flor that Mr. Brooks has to work hard to make the film not about her.

Instead, all it has to offer us is John as domestic hero. I will be interested to see how heroic he seems to today’s audiences.

***

“Life is a privilege, not an obligation.” That seems to have been the slogan of Ramon Sampedro, a Galician fisherman who became a quadriplegic in a diving accident and, 26 years later, decided that he wanted to kill himself. But it raises the question – how does he know it’s not an obligation? What he means is that he doesn’t want it to be an obligation.

Of course, you’ve got to sympathize with him. Especially you’ve got to sympathize with Javier Bardem’s portrayal of him in “The Sea Inside” (“Mar Adentro”), the moving and well-directed new film by Alejandro Amenabar, author of weird and atmospheric pieces like “Abre los ojos” (1997) and “The Others” (2001). Mr. Bardem makes Ramon a real charmer, and the frustrated longings of a man who can move nothing below his neck are palpable.

In a macabre sort of flirtation, he seduces two different women, Julia (Belen Rueda), a tragically fragile intellectual, and Rosa (Lola Duenas), an earthy factory girl with hidden depths, into providing him with the necessary assistance for his suicide.

Also brilliantly done is Amenabar’s portrayal of Ramon’s devoted and loving family – his taciturn brother Jose (Celso Bugallo), a farmer, and Jose’s wife, Manuela (Mabel Rivera), who does everything for him, their teenage son, Ramon’s nephew Javi (Tamar Novas), and Ramon’s and Jose’s senile father Joaquin (Joan Dalmau).

The family politics of being and bearing a burden are introduced with Javi’s comment on gramps, who is said to be “totally senile” and who “sits at home all day. Who needs him?”

Ramon tells his remarkably insensitive nephew: “Maybe some day you will be so sorry for what you just said that you will hate yourself,” but of course it is really he who hates himself for the absence from his life of what he calls “dignity.” At least grandpa doesn’t know how useless he is.

It will be clear that immensely complex moral issues are raised here, but the film doesn’t really come to grips with them. Ramon is allowed too easy a triumph over a quadriplegic priest, Father Francisco (Jose Maria Pou), who rather cleverly argues that his belief that his life is his own, to do with just as he pleases, is really an extension of the bourgeois desire for possession. Ramon, obviously a leftie, is meant to be given pause but instead merely brush es the idea aside because it comes from the Church, which every communist knows has always been capital’s lackey. So that’s it for that argument then.

Amenabar is allowing politics, and in particular the anti-clerical politics of post-Franco Spain, to do the moral heavy lifting for him here. Still, there are occasionally moments when he allows his film to show that it’s not as easy as that, as when poor old Joaquin, in his only moment of lucidity, says that “there’s only one thing worse than your kid dying on you: him wanting to.”

Maybe, after all, life is just a bit of an obligation.