Also this issue:

What Nobody Expects
A startling film combines the talents of two filmmakers.
-Cindy Fuchs

Michael Moore
-Sam Adams

Home on the Range
Bowling for Columbine may be scattershot, but it hits plenty of targets.
-Sam Adams

Screen Picks
-Sam Adams

October 17-23, 2002

movies

Adam's Crib

Curbing his enthusiasm: Adam Sandler takes it down

a notch in <i>Punch-Drunk Love</i>.

Curbing his enthusiasm: Adam Sandler takes it down a notch in Punch-Drunk Love.

Adam Sandler plays a manchild (again), but troubled (for once), and gives P.T. Anderson a boost.

by Sam Adams

Part of growing is admitting your age. So if Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love strains less overtly for “mature” themes than his overreaching Magnolia, it’s because Anderson is beginning to stop pretending to be his 60-year-old idols and learning to be himself. Though a song from Robert Altman’s Popeye continues under several scenes, Anderson has at least temporarily subdued his Altman fixation, managing for the first time since Hard Eight (or, if you’re an Anderson loyalist, Sydney) to keep his focus on a single character.

That interest is repaid in a performance of surprising depth from Adam Sandler, who plays Barry, a variation on his own honed-to-bluntness comic persona -- with the catch that the world around him is anything but comic. Sandler is as much of a manchild here as in any one of his tiresome movies (or as any one of his virtually identical Saturday Night Live characters), but his boyish façade is frequently shattered by explosive fits of rage. When, at a family gathering, Barry is pressed by his many sisters (including the wonderfully sluggish Mary Lynn Rajskub) about his awkward (and, as it turns out, arranged) meeting with the shy Lena (Emily Watson), he frets and writhes, and just when everything seems to have calmed down, puts his foot through the sliding glass door.

Anderson is still too enamored of his own film-school trickery. The first time a scene plays quietly for several minutes, Jon Brion's nagging, repetitive music building in the background until the quiet is sliced open by Barry's sudden tantrum, it's effective. The fifth or sixth time Anderson tries the same trick, not quite so. At times, Anderson seems merely to be testing his audience's capacity for annoyance. Undergirding a lengthy sequence with music that consists of little more than looped fragments and ever-building drums is roughly equivalent to twisting your shoulder muscles until they snap, and the same goes for the ample use of Shelley Duvall's off-key warble.

The challenge for Sandler and Watson, then, is to meet cute amid the din, which they do with ample charm; Watson seems as relieved to depart from her recent run of grief-stricken films as Sandler is to add some meat to his plateful of Cheetos. Anderson still loves his damaged dreamers -- Sandler's character is based in part on the California man who figured out how to trade in $3,000 worth of pudding cups for more than a million frequent-flyer miles. And he still thrives on outré plot twists: in this case, Barry calls a sex chat line one lonely night, and ends up targeted for theft and beatings by the service's sleazy owner (Anderson vet Philip Seymour Hoffman). But Punch-Drunk Love has the focus that's been missing from Anderson's films, along with a manic energy all its own. The film's aggressive quirkiness gets tiresome over the long haul, but Sandler's bid for Hulot-like stature almost comes off -- a small miracle, but a miracle nonetheless.