But anyone looking for a good old Sandler movie in "Punch Drunk Love" is looking in the wrong place. Here, for the first time, the actor has taken on a significantly different role. The film is still a comedy, but there is no gross-out humor and no over-the-top slapstick silliness this time around.
Sandler plays Barry Egan, a man with seven overbearing and abusive sisters. Egan has psychological problems; he is in many ways still a child with bizarre obsessions and extraordinary social discomfort. He runs his own struggling novelty toilet plunger business, and tries to collect frequent flier miles by exploiting marketing deals. Occasionally, Egan violently "freaks out"––usually provoked by his sisters––and destroys window panes and restaurant bathrooms.
In all his awkwardness and earnestness, Egan is a difficult character for an actor to convincingly bring to life, and Sandler succeeds brilliantly. He doesn't depart completely from his normal persona, but instead incorporates a new realism and humanity into the old Sandler act.
Playing opposite Sandler is Emily Watson as Lena Leonard, a businesswoman who is somewhat mysteriously taken by Egan's odd qualities and falls determinedly in love with him. Leonard has a few quirks of her own, though she is far more functional than Barry, and Watson's gentle portrayal of her plays beautifully against the manic, often barely controlled Barry.
Behind their strange but affecting love affair lies the specter of a call to a phone sex line that Barry makes in a moment of weakness. The man who runs the phone sex business, memorably played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, blackmails Barry and sends some thugs to his home in Los Angeles to wreck his life.
Director Paul Thomas Anderson is perhaps the most imaginative auteur working in Hollywood today. He isn't afraid to use visual metaphors and his films tend to be long. "Punch Drunk Love" is far shorter than previous Anderson efforts like "Magnolia," but it doesn't feel rushed. Like a great piece of music, the rhythm isn't static; the director knows when to linger and when to deftly speed up the story. At times, Anderson brilliantly combines dialogue, camera work, music and acting to construct scenes that bring the viewer inside Egan's overburdened head. The experience leaves the audience slightly dazed and provides a greater understanding of the world as Egan sees it.
Without descending into cliché, some of the music and scenes pay tribute to romance movies of the '40s and '50s. At one point, Egan journeys off into bright light to meet his love, and as he moves into the distance his figure is obscured by the glow. But instead of walking down a road into the rising or setting sun, Anderson places Egan in an airport gangway with a window at the end, trotting down the metal hallway to board a plane. "Punch Drunk Love" features inescapably realistic characters stuck in a concrete and steel world, yet the story does not strive for realism and it is not afraid to be happy.