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Directed by – Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring – Adam Sandler (Barry Egan), Emily Watson (Lena Leonard), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Dean Trumbell), Luis Guzman (Lance), Mary Lynn Rajskub (Elizabeth Egan)

Length – 91 minutes

Cert – 15 / R

When growing up, Paul Thomas Anderson used to tell his teachers that he would win an Oscar. He has come close, nominated more for his writing than directing, but has not yet won that statue himself. Punch-Drunk Love in particular received no Academy Award nominations whatsoever. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002, it was nominated for best film. Anderson won the award for best director.

The simply elegant poster with the lead characters in silhouette feels incredibly appropriate and yet fantastically misleading. Disguised as a romantic comedy, Punch-Drunk Love dares to be different, as a twisted romantic fairy-tale subverting the genre traits, even by having the girl asking the guy out for dinner. With dashes of the disturbing and depressing mixed with black comedy and unanswerable questions, this could have been quite the career killer move for Anderson and his star, Adam Sandler. For example, why open the film with a car crash that isn't related to anything else (or is it?). Well, why not? Must we have an answer for everything when quite possibly there isn't one? And if you're rather perturbed by that sentence then it's quite likely that this film isn't for you.

Barry Egan (Sandler) runs his own business of unusually extravagant, and sometimes unbreakable, toilet plungers. However something is not quite right about him. His sister Elizabeth (Rajskub) thinks he's "such a freak" and sometimes he has to resort to smashing something. One bizarre morning at work he witnesses a car crash, picks up a keyboard instrument (similar to an organ) left on the kerb by a cab, and meets Lena (Watson) who drops her car off so that the mechanics next door can check it, leaving Barry with the keys. Later that night he attends the birthday party of one of his seven sisters, with disastrous consequences. Back at home he calls a sex chatline, with even more disastrous consequences. Then the next day he meets Lena again.

It's left to your largely uneducated guess what Barry could be suffering from. When asked by Elizabeth's husband what might be wrong Barry responds saying that he doesn't know if there is anything wrong because he doesn't know "how other people are." So like a car crash waiting to happen, there's the constant thought at the back of your head that Barry is going to screw up his relationship with Lena somehow.

Having directed Tom Cruise to an Oscar nomination in Magnolia, there was a bit of buzz about Adam Sandler being a contender for best actor come the Oscars. He had to make do with a Golden Globe nomination. His character Barry is so obviously alone. In the opening shot he is situated in the far corner of his excuse for an office, isolated. At home it's a similar story, with a one-take shot capturing him surrounded by emptiness. Although Sandler shoehorns himself into generally comedic roles, this proved that he does have the depth to do serious, even dangerously aggressive. Since then the hidden depth has managed to come out more than once with un-Sandler like roles in Reign Over Me and more recently in Funny People.

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