Punch-Drunk Love: A-

When a film stars Adam Sandler as a repressed nut-job you except several things; you expect fat men who fart and burp (occasionally while smothering someone else); you expect senile old-women who like to curse and hit people with their canes; you expect the number of toilet jokes to skyrocket past 97 before you've even hit the half-way mark. What you don't expect, what I didn't expect, is for a film staring America's favorite idiot to be so tenderly alive. In the delicately beautiful tale of Barry Egan's (Adam Sandler) romance with Lena Leonard (Emily Watson) writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson finds as much thematically rich material here as in his 180-minute virtuoso opera Magnolia while also scaling down his camera from a cast of dozens to a cast of two. What he shows us, while his cameras are flying about in exuberant gestures around these two oddballs, refreshes and revitalizes the genre of romantic-comedy with enormous heart and inventiveness.

I'll start with Barry's character. He constantly wears an electric-blue suit. He's a nervous man who runs a business selling plungers. He has seven sisters. He is prone to explosions of rage. He has (presumably) never dated another woman, or even thought of her in romantic terms. He is an emotional and mental wreck. If this sounds like alot to swallow, or even wrap your head around, the film wastes no time in shrouding his character; the opening scene renders him as he is in the above paragraph with barely a spoken word. Still, as such a freak how are we supposed to be allowed to care for him? The answer lies in the nature of his psychosis - he's a wreck, but he's a uniquely 21st century wreck. The fact that he was mothered by seven sisters from birth may be at the root of his problems but living in the Now has exacerbated them into who he is when he and the audience first meet. Atleast he's lucky enough to be played by Adam Sandler, allowing him a modicum of immediate empathy from all the crazed Happy Gilmore fans out there.

Barry's also lucky, and un-, in a few other ways. First he has a chance meeting with a woman named Lena when she comes to get her car fixed at the mechanic next to his store. One thing leads to another and they end up dating. The most refreshing thing about his meeting her is how he is stripped of his mannerisms and let free; or rather, how is big discombobulated mess of a self finally finds a center in passion for a woman. There's a flip side though. When Barry and Lena start dating he's already being black-mailed by a phone sex operator and her pimp (Philip Seymour Hoffman). There's a touch of surreal black comedy in the set-up - Boy gets lonely, Boy calls Phone Sex Girl, Boy gets Stalked by Phone Sex Girl - and the film has sevral laughs at the contrast between a great love and a cheap one.

But Barry and Lena are definitely the great love. I can tell that by the way that Anderson's camera practically swoons over the two and how his music choices jump from the instrumental to the enrapturing everytime they meet. It's ok though that the puppy-dog romance is given such a treatment in Love. We want these characters to be happy. Emily Watson, with a delicious lilting British accent, is charmingly charming as saintly Lena and Sandler never once strays into over-acting; his Barry is as sweetly human around his girl as he isn't around anyone else. The genius of it all though, the great thing that the film pulls off here, is in making our hero-in-need-of-romance such a modern mess the whole formula of rom-com's is turned on its ear. Where once it was the search for perfection-meets-perfection (because, really, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan's beauty would have killed anyone else they fell for), in Punch-Drunk Love it becomes the search for like-meets-like; two people who happen to be alittle charming happen to fall alittle in love.

The final uber-trick Paul Thomas Anderson pulls out of his bag is in the visual styling. Now I won't make any excuses for the LSD-meets-disco interludes but I will happily exclaim the excellence of some of the director's finer points - such as Barry's suit, as a wail of depression, or Lena's dress, a jolt of passion. To me, this is the kind of film that David Lynch might have been accused of making, where the subversive currents of life manipulate a person more than the person manipulates the currents. The problem is that in Lynch's hands Punch-Drunk Love would have been stupefyingly inert, whereas crafted by Anderson everything - from the harmonium at the beginning to the scheme with the pudding throughout - makes sense. He turns imagination into the grand liberator of romance. Not only that, he sparks a vital presence in Adam Sandler that burns bright for his career.