Punch Drunk Love

I avoided Adam Sandler movies for a long time. Whatever it was about him, I didn’t get it.

I originally approached PT Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love with great apprehension. Anderson got career-best performances from movie-stars Burt Reynolds and Tom Cruise as well as an army of character actors, but the thought of him making a movie with Adam Sandler, I have to say, filled me with something like dread.

Well, he’s simply extraordinary in this picture, honestly, one of the great lead performances of our time. If you’ve never seen it, you owe it to yourself. Rarely have I left a movie theater feeling as alive as I did after seeing this movie.

Amazingly, Sandler pulls it off opposite none other than brainiacs Emily Watson and Philip Seymour Hoffman. His performance is full of detail, nuance and exquisitely observed detail. His performance is so unclassifiable that I initially felt baffled by it. It sounds like stunt-casting but it turns out to be something more like a miracle. Even though his character is as shy and closed-off as possible, he practically quivers with electricity.

Strangely enough, this movie fits right next to my Jim Carrey trilogy. In his own way, Sandler’s character is also a man-child who needs supernatural force to move on with his life. In his case, it’s a magic piano that shows up at the beginning of the movie, delivered immediately after an SUV spectacularly overturns in front of his office (I could practically hear Anderson say to his DP “Please tell me we got that.”)

The phone call between Sandler and Hoffman is one of the great real-life conversations ever filmed. Neither can believe that the other has the balls to say the things he’s saying, but neither one wants to hang up, lest the other get the better of him. The call escalates to such baroque levels of anger and disbelief, and yet feels completely real. I myself have had similar phone calls with the personnel of Verizon, Dish TV, Chase bank and Toyota Santa Monica, so I’ve had plenty of recent experience to compare it to.

But that’s another story.