A surprisingly focused (coming in at just under 90 minutes) and mature work from a wunderkind director that until now unfailingly diluted his occasional strokes of brilliance with acres of blather, Punch-Drunk Love features a shockingly adept turn by Adam Sandler, a man who has built a dung empire from speech impediments and psychopathic outbursts. Punch-Drunk Love tethers Sandler's propensity towards mining lisps, race, and so on for humour as it gives careful rein to the sudden violent outbursts that Sandler, heretofore, had always used to comic effect. The resulting performance is something of a marvel in that it is everything that we expect from Sandler, now guided in the right direction. Not only is the picture the successful rendering of One Hour Photo, it's one of those things that one never suspected could exist: the perfect Adam Sandler vehicle that doesn't, consequently, suck.

Sandler is Barry Egan, a man fond of blue suits and possessed of a severe personality disorder who owns and operates, it would seem, his own decorative toilet-plunger business out of a warehouse. When he meets Lena (Emily Watson) one day as she's dropping off her car at the mechanic's next door, Barry, in his painful, clearly dangerous way, falls in love. Subtext left as subtext, the story proper is the classic quirky pursuit intrigue involving a stalker personality and an impossibly angelic pursued. Rather than wallow in the shallow end of formula, however, the picture destabilizes the protagonists' respective roles, making Barry unbalanced rather than rakishly dogged and the inamorata, Lena, aware of her peril and excited by it.

What Anderson manages in Punch-Drunk Love is to pace the familiar motions of the unlikely romance between rogue and prize to a broken calliope. It is discordant and calculatedly jarring, projecting Barry's ruined mind's confusion and fear, building a tension and sense of danger that is delicious in its nerviness. Anderson regular Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Dean the Mattress Man, a mattress salesman moonlighting as the operator of a phone-sex scam operator who provides the film the bulk of its emotional and physical conflict.

Yet Punch-Drunk Love is more than an exercise in genre explosion: it is an exploration of the actual euphoria of new love, perhaps even first love, in all its uncontainable passion and rash acts. Anderson presents a pudding label contest in a way as interesting and romantic as canned peaches in a Wong Kar Wai film and makes of an impromptu Sandler soft-shoe in a grocery aisle something as pure and sentimental as Gene Kelly splashing through pools of water. The picture's soundtrack is now raucous, now soaring romantic overture while the look of the piece falls in the midst of Polanski's penchant for slow push-ins and Kubrick's affection for the sterility of modernity, though it's warm.

Punch-Drunk Love enthrals for its craftsmanship and its conviction, for its fabulous instinct for magical realism (a piano appearing in the middle of a road, a telephone booth light coming on at the moment of joyous connection), and for a pair of performances that almost speak more for Anderson's talent for casting than the actors themselves. Punch-Drunk Love is a work of Beckett-ian poetry, a carefully structured scream of consciousness that is tortured and unsettling--but unquestionably alive.-Walter Chaw