Monday at the Movies - June 4, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, more pudding than I was expecting.

Punch-Drunk Love (2002) – Voluntarily watching an Adam Sandler movie is quite low on my list of priorities, and yet Punch-Drunk Love is just a film that happens to have Adam Sandler in it. Guided by the masterful script and direction of Paul Thomas Anderson, a true Cinema King favorite ever since There Will Be Blood, Sandler proves himself quite competent when he puts forth the effort. Sandler stars as Barry Egan, a plunger salesman with seven sisters, an anxiety problem, and a temper to match; contemporaneous with meeting the besotted Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), Barry’s life falls headlong into a number of implausible schemes, ranging from identity theft to exchanging pudding cups for airline miles. It’s the sort of oddball plot that might fit in a Coen Brothers movie (think Burn After Reading), only Anderson is more deadly serious than I suspect the Coens would ever attempt, aided by a tense and clattering score from Jon Brion that seems to anticipate Anderson’s later work with Jonny Greenwood. That Anderson gets as good a performance from Sandler as he does a score from Brion is one of the film’s greatest pleasures, as Sandler funnels his nervous energy into a compelling character who bears none of the lame humor pervasive in the rest of his career. Among the surprises of the film, aside from the pudding, is a captivating appearance by the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman as a shouty mattress salesman slash phone sex pimp; Hoffman is as commanding as he ever was, an apt reminder of his unsettled performance as Anderson’s eponymous Master. Punch-Drunk Love is a brisk forerunner of Anderson’s longer epics, but it displays his consistent manipulation of tension, even in the screwiest of circumstances.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!