OxfordPress.com

Grade: C+

Verdict: Audacious and disjointed, yet strangely beautiful.

Details: Starring Adam Sandler and Emily Watson. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Rated R for strong language, including a scene of sexual dialogue. 95 minutes. Limited release [an error occurred while processing this directive]

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Review: I love Paul Thomas Anderson's movies. I loved "Boogie Nights." I loved "Magnolia"--thought it was the best movie of 1999. Even the frog storm, which many decried as pretentious, was OK with me; by then, he'd won me over.

Three years later, Anderson's eagerly awaited "Punch-Drunk Love" is like one frog storm after another. Audacious and disjointed, yet strangely beautiful, it asks us to make several leaps of faith, but doesn't really reward us for our perseverance.

Anderson does, however, draw from Adam Sandler the most surprising, moving work we've ever seen from the comedian. It's enough to make you forget that Sandler has built a career on movies that rely on overheated bulldogs and children's urinary habits for cheap, easy laughs.

Here, he's cast aside his usual quirks: the high-pitched voice that drops to a gravelly growl, the nervous shufflestep, the funny little songs about his mother and Hanukkah. Anderson made for him a complex character, and Sandler made him complete human being.

The star of "Little Nicky" and "Big Daddy" may seem an odd choice to play the lead in a romantic comedy, but then again, "Punch-Drunk Love" isn't exactly romantic. And it isn't exactly a comedy, either. It's hard to describe what it is.

It could be a psychedelic take on the Technicolor films of the 1940s and '50s; it could just be the story of a guy who buys a bunch of pudding. Either way, it's much shorter and lighter than previous films from Anderson, who, at just 32, has made his name with long, emotionally draining roller-coaster rides.

Sandler stars as Barry Egan, who sells custom plumbing supplies from a nondescript warehouse in the San Fernando Valley, the setting of all of Anderson's films. (The plunger with dice on the handle is a huge hit in Las Vegas.)

Barry figures out a way to rack up 1.25 million frequent flyer miles from buying $3,000 worth of Healthy Choice pudding cups -- something a real-life person did.

Not that Barry ever flies anywhere--but he could, if he wanted to get away from his seven sisters, whose years of nagging and smothering have rendered him a social misfit. Shy almost to the point of paralysis most times, he flies into inexplicable fits of rage at others.

One night, from his bland little apartment, he calls a phone sex line because he needs someone to talk to; he tried confiding in his brother-in-law (Robert Smigel), who he thought was a doctor, but is really a dentist, proving how clueless Barry is.

The next morning, the breathy voice on the other end of the line calls back from Utah and tries to extort money from him. When Barry tries to wriggle away, her boss (Anderson regular Philip Seymour Hoffman) sends four brothers to Los Angeles to shake him down.

At the same time, Barry is falling in love--hence the title -- with Lena (Emily Watson), a co-worker of one of Barry's sisters (an extremely natural Mary Lynn Rajskub).

Why Lena falls for Barry is a bit of a mystery--she confesses she saw his photo and asked to meet him, but what did she see in him? Anderson never fully develops her character, but that's not a huge deal; what she represents in terms of Barry's transformation is more important than who she is, and Watson conveys such sweetness and vulnerability, you want their romance to flourish.

All this probably doesn't make sense, and Anderson's sometimes overbearing use of sound clouds things further. A phone rings, and it's so loud, it's ear-splitting. Barry destroys the men's bathroom during a date with Lena, and it's thunderous. And Jon Brion's score sometimes reaches a level of cacophony that covers the characters' words.

But why? Then again, why do frogs fall from the sky? If you're a fan of Anderson's work, you'll just open your umbrella and step bravely into the downpour.

— Christy Lemire, The Associated Press