***½/****
starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
by Bill Chambers Punch-Drunk Love or, Un Redemption de Adam Sandler. Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film finds him at both his most experimental (dig those Scopitone interludes) and least windy–the tip-off is a running time of well under two hours. But first: Adam Sandler. When you hear Oscar buzz around a popular comedian, it generally means they've repressed everything that made them popular. (Jim Carrey in The Majestic, for example: Carrey may do a mean James Stewart impersonation, but he's no Jimmy himself.) Sandler has not been cast against type as the mercurial Barry in Punch-Drunk Love, he's simply been repurposed; after Barry's first sudden outburst, you'll find it difficult to imagine anyone else in the role, since Anderson needed someone who could go from 0-90 in a flash, a basset hound with a rabid streak. (Sandler's excellent, if that isn't clear.) Barry runs a wholesale plunger business but it's an unfulfilling life and he can do better–and so he tries, by simultaneously purchasing pudding in bulk to exploit a loophole in an Air Miles promotion; standing up to the penny-ante extortionists running a phone-sex line (run by Philip Seymour Hoffman, in a standout cameo-length role); and accepting an invitation to know the enigmatic, ethereal Lena Leonard (Emily Watson). Watson has never looked as luminous as she does through Punch-Drunk Love cinematographer Robert Elswit's lens, nor are there any cracks in her veneer that lead us to doubt her attraction to this wayward soul. A sequence in which she is in physical jeopardy is among the more difficult things to watch in movies, she's just so precious. The combination of Watson, the onset of autumn, and Anderson's totally idiosyncratic style left me more euphoric than I can suggest with words, and isn't that the foundation of so-called punch-drunk love? PROGRAM: SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS
