Love on the brink of chaos

Sandler's performance has already been talked about as if it were a turn in a silent comedy. But the great silent comics didn't have the expectation of speech; their faces and bodies were their means of expression. Sandler's performance is instead about the agony of Barry's inarticulateness, his stunted desire to connect and communicate, and his inability to define his free-floating pain. In one scene Barry approaches his brother-in-law, the only medical professional he knows, for help. "I don't like myself very much," he says. "Can you help me?"

It's a piercing scene, on the surface a comic moment (his brother-in-law is a dentist) -- but only on the surface. There is a raw helplessness in Sandler that lifts this big child-man above being a figure of fun. The impact of the scene depends entirely on our ability to believe in Sandler as a soul in torment, and he pulls it off smashingly. It's an amazing performance.

And it draws on what Anderson must have sensed in Sandler's screen persona. At times he has seemed like a gargantuan gnome, specializing in the mumbling misfits and arrested dimwits who were Jerry Lewis' stock in trade. But Lewis, courting the audience's sympathy, played sweet. And Sandler has always carried the threat of sudden, bellowing, red-faced rage. (Think of the moment in "The Wedding Singer" when he harangues a marriage reception with a screaming, hoarse-voiced cover of "Love Stinks.") Those moments come in "Punch-Drunk Love" as well, and they're the most startling, disturbing and, finally, in Barry's ultimate outburst, the most elating in the movie. There's no phony Chaplin pathos in Sandler's performance, none of the self-love or elfin dearness that comics in dramatic roles often resort to in order to manipulate an audience's affections.

Essentially, Sandler is giving the kind of performance that won praise for Björk's masochistic pixie routine in "Dancer in the Dark" and for Emmanuel Schotté's ludicrous nonperformance in "Humanité." Unlike those, Sandler's performance isn't a stunt. He does something very difficult, working as an actor to articulate Barry's painful lack of articulation. Sandler never sentimentalizes Barry, even when the character finally has something to lose.

That something is Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), a young woman who works with one of Barry's sisters and who has fallen in love with him. Anderson doesn't explain why, but he doesn't treat Lena's feelings for Barry as a conceit, either. "Punch-Drunk Love" is about the inexplicable, life-changing nature of unexpected connections, and Anderson doesn't try to shortchange the power of romance by offering an explanation for it. (Bertrand Blier never did that in his romantic comedies, either.) In both execution and subject, "Punch-Drunk Love" speaks to Anderson's faith in the way odd matches can make perfect sense, not just in terms of the collaboration between him and Sandler but of the onscreen collaboration between Sandler and Watson as well.

Watching the two leads connect here is like watching milk make its way through the loopy course of a Silly Straw. Watson isn't just Barry's ray of sunshine, she's the movie's. Her role and her whole demeanor -- those kewpie-doll eyes and the sweetheart face that carries its own romantic comedy lineage -- suggest the sylph-like lovelies of 1930s musicals. When she's onscreen you half expect a baritone to break into "Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?"

But Watson doesn't have the breathless girlishness you associate with those roles. She combines a bright-eyed expectation with the sureness of a woman who knows what she wants. Unlike Barry, Lena isn't desperate. But, like him, she's looking to carve a place for herself amidst the anonymity of the movie's workplaces and apartments, and even the anonymity of the never-changing Los Angeles blue skies. In the movie's dreamy midsection, when Barry follows Lena to Hawaii, Watson and Sandler, along with the whole movie, seem to be swaying to a lazy, love-drenched rhythm.

Even amid the threat of violence and the movie's riffs on urban alienation, Anderson gives "Punch-Drunk Love" something of the idealization of musical comedy. It proceeds more by poetic than narrative logic. That's a problem in one of the movie's subplots, in which Barry is being blackmailed by an unscrupulous phone-sex mogul (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and is chased by the mogul's goons, four hulking brothers (played by four real-life brothers, David, Jimmy, Nathan and Mike Stevens); no actual criminal could be as dumb as Hoffman's character is. But that part of the story also functions as the sort of threat that, in idealized comedies and musicals, can make the possibility of loss even more acute. (There's a heart-stopping moment when you fear Lena may be in danger.)

Next Page: Adam Sandler -- this generation's answer to Cary Grant in "North by Northwest"?

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