The Cobbler

The Cobbler is a 2014 American magic realism comedy-drama film directed by Tom McCarthy and co-written by McCarthy with Paul Sado. The film stars Adam Sandler, Cliff "Method Man" Smith, Ellen Barkin, Melonie Diaz, Dan Stevens, Fritz Weaver, Yul Vazquez, Steve Buscemi, and Dustin Hoffman. It was screened in the Special Presentations section at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. The film was released on March 13, 2015, by Image Entertainment. The film was panned by critics and was a box office bomb. Plot On New York City's Lower East Side in 1903, a group of Jewish men gather in a cobbler's shop to discuss a neighborhood problem. Gergerman has been threatening their businesses, harassing them and their families. Handing a pair of Gergerman's shoes to the cobbler, Pinchas Simkin, he takes them to the shop basement and uses a special stitching machine on the shoes. His young son Herschel enters, and he explains how important the machine is. In the present day, the great-grandson of Pinchas, Max Simkin is the cobbler. Jimmy operates the barber shop next door. Carmen Herrera, a young woman of the Lower East Side is fighting against large developers who are tearing down parts of the neighborhood to build huge complexes. Max doesn't seem to care at all about the shop. He lives at home with his ailing mother Sarah and wishes they could see Max's father again. Local thug Leon Ludlow brings his shoes to the shop to resole them. Max's current stitching machine fails, so he uses the old one. He checks Ludlow's shoe size; it's 10 1/2, the same as his. Max tries the shoes on and transforms into Ludlow. He uses the machine on other shoes, and realizes what he can do with it.