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Punch-Drunk Love
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, and Philip Seymour Hoffman
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Punch-Drunk Love­ the new Adam Sandler movie­ has become a semi-surprise hit in the US. Its highly-touted premiere at Cannes was no surprise­ the French are always at the forefront of film fashions, even those they create themselves (as they usually do). But in America, the film had a major obstacle to overcome: Adam Sandler. Sure the movie was written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson­ who had pleased highbrows with Boogie Nights and Magnolia­ but Sandler was antithetical to Anderson's high-tone reputation. For although Sandler's films are commercial successes, he himself is deemed too lowbrow for serious consideration, a mere panderer to the gross-out sensibilities of teenaged boys, a smart business man who has prostituted his minor comic talents to please the 13-to-18-year-old crowd. So what were critics going to do when Punch-Drunk Love opened?

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Well, high art won out, and without much to-do the film was hailed not only as a comic masterpiece, but as a huge advance for Sandler who­ overnight­ moved from being a ragtag, not-very-good, teen-boy favorite to a near genius who had finally found his true calling as a performer of depth, sensitivity, and psychological brilliance. And all that was, for the most part, true. Punch-Drunk Love is a terrific movie: funny, frightening, on the very edge of psychological surrealism, and packs an emotional clobber that elude most other contemporary films.

But the irony here is that Punch-Drunk Love is not all that different from Adam Sandler's past films. Indeed, it's extraordinarily similar to his 1998 hit Waterboy and deals, in a more sophisticated way, with the same themes. So what's going on? Why has Adam Sandler suddenly been lifted from the realm of the gross masses and welcomed into the pantheon of "great cinema?"

Like Boogie Nights and Magnolia­ Anderson's most successful films­ Punch-Drunk Love is quirky and off-beat. Sandler plays Barry Egan, a nice-enough small-time business man who's overwhelmed with anger and loneliness. Part of the problem is his family of four intrusive sisters who alternately set him up on dates or spend their time disparaging him. But mostly he's unsure of himself and afraid to deal with women. At a family party he confesses to his brother-in-law that sometimes he just cries and cries, and can't stop, a few minutes later­ in a complete fury­ he smashes the glass patio doors in his sister's suburban home.

One night Barry calls a phone-sex service and gets hooked into what is obviously a scam­ the woman asks for far too much confidential information­ and the next day he finds himself trapped in a nightmare of blackmail and escalating violence, as the blackmailers, masterminded by Philip Seymour Hoffman, send four thuggish brothers to shake him down for more money. Simultaneously he meets Lena Leonard (played by Emily Watson)­ a woman who is determinedly interested in him and refuses to stop pursuing him­ and it looks as though (if he can escape the thugs) he will finally have a chance at happiness.

Sandler's strength as a performer is that he captures perfectly a type of male insecurity and vulnerability that has been­ by and large­ unfashionable in Hollywood films since the emergence of the kill-'em-all action heroes of Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sly Stallone. These post-Vietnam War heroes brought back the real, red-blooded American male star at a time when American masculinity was felt as being under attack by feminism, gay liberation, and a downscaled economy that essentially made bread-winners losers.

In revolt against these images, Sandler emerged as a new type of man­ childish, emotionally unsure of himself, at times infantile, and often even a little queer (who else would have appeared as on "Saturday Night Live" playing gay characters or in drag.) No surprise that teen boys­ those harbingers of new trends of masculinity and popular taste­ were drawn to him. Sure there were shit jokes (as there are in Aristophanes), and fall-down humor, and often dumbbell situations­ but Sandler spoke directly and clearly to boys who realized that Arnold, Bruce, and Sylvester were totally fucked-up older guys who were still fighting some stupid battle about what it meant to be a man that ended sometime in the late 1960s.

The reason Adam Sandler movies got no respect from critics was that their critique of masculinity was too frightening­ especially coming from a mainstream film aimed at the young. The fact that so many of these new comedians­ Tom Green, Rob Schneider, Sandler, among others­ get relegated to teen-boy stars is that they all look and act a little gay, a little queer. These are not performances that make grown-up men (who have constructed the correct, socially-appropriate structures to protect themselves) feel comfortable. Sandler's performance as the emotionally-arrested queer man is only the last in a long line a Jewish film comedians beginning with Eddie Cantor and the Marx Brothers in the 1930s, through to Danny Kaye and Jerry Lewis in the 1950s­ a fact that no critic has confronted.

Punch-Drunk Love, is, granted, a better made movie than Sandler's other films­ it draws directly on Kafka rather then the Marx Brothers. But really, there isn't much difference between those two, except for the fact that the Marx Brothers are more fun and that their oeuvre more interesting and varied. But really, this is just another Adam Sandler movie. The problem isn't that Sandler got better, it's that no one appreciated him to begin with.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com