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EDITORIAL:
To Love a Punch Drunk
There is a very strict formula to an Adam Sandler movie. Sandler portrays a lonely misfit with a good heart and debatable brain; in his lesser films, characters come saddled with hot tempers, manifested by his voice's abrupt rise of volume and, occasionally, a flushed neck. As the film opens, it becomes apparent that his protagonist is struggling to live up to expectations. His obstacle is frequently ennui -- because Sandler is a poet of American suburbia, however, this is portrayed as simple sloth. The word ennui has no place in an Adam Sandler film, nor should it.
Of all the comedian's works, last fall's Punch Drunk Love is the most curious. It is the first Adam Sandler movie that is not an Adam Sandler movie. Unlike his previous pictures, the script comes from the pen of neither Sandler nor one of his lackeys, but rather the director Paul Thomas Anderson, an upper-middle-brow auteur who once made a 19 hour movie about pornography. On its surface, Punch Drunk Love seems to meet the sensibility of its creator more than its star: There are thick art-house silences, fancy psychedelic scene changes, poignant moments of surrealism, Philip Seymour Hoffman. As a result, the picture has skirted the critical beating to which Sandler's movies are typically subjected.
Perhaps movie critics' smug embracement of Punch Drunk Love is best summed up in a haughty report from The Onion, "Adam Sandler Fans Disappointed by Intelligent, Nuanced Performance." As the article's man-on-the-street quotee explains, "I didn't pay $9 to see Adam Sandler wrestle with some psychological crisis. He could have at least put a trash-can lid on his head and gone, 'I'm Crazy Trash Head!'"
While film snoots from The Onion on up portray Anderson's film as a dramatic stretch for Sandler -- and, by extension, his dim bulb patrons -- they neglect the fact that Punch Drunk Love unfolds in the exact same manner as all of Sandler's other pictures. His protagonist suffers from extreme loneliness and societal disconnection, throwing his usual temper tantrums and breaking things with the recklessness of a man handling movie props. In keeping with Sandler's formula, the character leaves his funk after meeting a woman who becomes inexplicably charmed by his eccentricities. (The brave lass is played by Emily Watson, whose movie characters collect issue-laden boyfriends like they were postage stamps.) The heroine eases Sandler's character into a late adulthood, he overcomes his problems, and they spend eternity staring into one another's eyes.
Only where Sandler's typical movies must shoe-horn reams of PG-13 jokes and Popeye's Chicken toasts into their scripts, Punch Drunk Love coasts on its peculiarities. The Onion's man-on-the-street makes a good argument: It would have been nice had Sandler covered his head in a trash-can lid and christened himself Crazy Trash Head.
"Inevitably, comedians all want to be leading men and do something that's serious or different," Randy Newman, a songwriter who for decades has cut the divide between comedy and pathos, told Lowbrow last summer. "But comedy is a great art. Jim Carrey may not want to make Dumb and Dumber forever, but if he did, it would be just fine with me. Adam Sandler is perhaps the only comedian who's content to stick with comedy. I hear he's a good guy, too -- that he's unchanged by everything that's happened to him. And that is so rare as to be almost... well, it's never happened. Everyone changes."
Mr. Sandler should be awarded Norwegian medallions and Pennsylvanian chocolates for spurning change; he should be given an off-hours tour of Disneyland atop Goofy's shoulders for releasing 8 Crazy Nights mere months after walking the carpet of Cannes for Punch Drunk Love. Because Adam Sandler has not followed Jim Carrey and betrayed his comic muse; he may not let a trash-can lid disrupt this character's ennui, but his fans are smart enough to feel Crazy Trash Head's tacit presence. Punch Drunk Love is not a dramatic stretch for Adam Sandler -- it's just a hoity-toity Happy Gilmore. Fooling the highbrows into applauding him could be the comedian's most Sandlerific act of all.
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