[4]

About two minutes into Punch-Drunk Love, an absurdist romance from Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia), you learn the movie doesn’t really take place in the real world and none of the characters are real, either. It’s all… some other version of reality. A version where Adam Sandler sells toilet plungers out of a warehouse, collects pudding to cash in on sweepstakes, has seven aggressively annoying sisters, and deals with bouts of rage and depression. Then Emily Watson enters his life and they fall deeply in love with one another, all while a phone sex company keeps sending hit-men to find Sandler and bilk him for money.

Anderson had me for maybe thirty or forty minutes here. I thought maybe Punch-Drunk Love would have something allegorical to say about male rage, or the politically-correct castration of the modern man… something like that would have gotten me excited. But if it’s allegory, I never solved the puzzle. Instead, the movie just spirals into an insipid love story. I don’t know what Sandler’s character sees in Emily Watson, and I definitely don’t know what she sees in him. It’s one weird character falling in love with another weird character, which is charming in something like The Fisher King, but annoying when it happens in this movie. So the love shit just didn’t do anything for me. At all.

But if I had to say something nice about the movie, I could. Sandler is actually really interesting in this movie. It may well be the only time I’ve reacted even remotely favorably to him in any movie ever. As with Anderson’s other films, the cinematography is gorgeous and inspired. I love how Sandler’s character is so pathetic that even the camera gets bored with him at times — drifting to other objects off frame, or lingering on a background long after he’s exited the shot. I thought that was smart stuff. I also enjoyed Jon Brion’s rather avant-garde scoring of the movie. And Phillip Seymour Hoffman is funny once or twice.