Punch-Drunk Love

Paul Thomas Anderson built this as a deliberate turn after Magnolia. He said he wanted to make himself happy and get rid of all this cancer and crying, and he wrote the part for Adam Sandler from the start. The pudding scheme that looks like a gag is real. In a 1999 Healthy Choice promotion the California engineer David Phillips turned a few thousand dollars of pudding into more than a million frequent flyer miles, and Anderson got permission from Phillips and the company to use it. Barry’s arithmetic works because it worked in reality. Scenes are joined by Jeremy Blake’s abstract colour field work, used as pressure, not transition. Barry’s rage is played straight against the comic register, the sister scenes are staged as ambush, and the harmonium dumped in the street is never explained. Anderson won Best Director at Cannes, but the prize was shared: Im Kwon-taek won it too, for Chi-hwa-seon. Sandler was nominated for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes; Richard Gere won for Chicago. A good fit if you want a romance whose centre is a dangerous man rather than a lovable one, and can take the abstract colour interludes. Not for anyone expecting Sandler’s familiar comic shape; the outbursts here are not built to be laughed at.