Either in honor of its 23rd anniversary, or just because it’s that evergreenly good, “Punch-Drunk Love” will screen at Long Island’s go-to arthouse cinema on Friday, May 23rd at 7 p.m.
Paul Thomas “PTA” Anderson turned many heads—on the heels of what I decree while presenting my “you gotta understand, I’m a cinephile” ID his magnum opus, the operatic and messy masterpiece “Magnolia” (1999)—when he announced who would front his next film.
“I’ve always considered Adam Sandler [Dean] Martin and [Jerry] Lewis,” PTA told one Cannes panel interviewer who suspected the duo’s 1955 film “Artists and Models” as one of “Punch Drunk Love’s” key inspirations.
The unlikely pairing surprised everyone with a screwy rom-com hijacked by a psych-thriller
collaboration that permitted the funnyman to deliver his usual mumbling charmer with an acute rage-come-alive schick, just cut to different music by a reel conductor this go-around.
In the years since his “look what I can do” 2002, Sandler has continued to occasionally dip into the dramatic deep end.
“Reign Over Me” (2007) casts him as a grieving 9/11 widower. In “Funny People” (2009) for Massapequa native Judd Apatow, he’s a movie star who revives his stand-up career after getting diagnosed with cancer. “Uncut Gems” (2019) makes a sports gambling addict out of a “sandman” we still find ourselves rooting for even when he’s gone too far off the rails.
These and more “one for them” Sandler entries all have “Punch-Drunk Love” to thank for being the first, though. They tap into a truth that Sandler’s always possessed since his days busking in the NYC subways while studying drama—not a typo—at NYU in the mid-1980s.
For all its tears, “Reign Over Me” is about how major ingredients to treating overwhelming loss can be found somewhere over a rainbow called midnight Mel Brooks movie marathons.
“Funny People” is about redefining your career, and reclaiming your life in the process.
“Uncut Gems” is about the pursuit of victory in the face of all naysayers.
And “Punch-Drunk Love,” so says PTA, is about finding your rhythm, your music, your balance and your dance partner—which, in many ways, also describes the aforementioned three.
The film sees Sandler as Barry Egan, a troubled man with doorway OCD and massive self-concept woes. His seven sisters are relentlessly intrusive. He oddly wears a royal blue suit to his toilet plunger factory job, stocks up on supermarket puddings by day and calls phone sex hotlines by night. He’s not a loser—he just hasn’t won a damn thing yet.
It takes the simultaneous emergence of a harmonium and a red-dressed enchantress—who low-key may be just as high-key disturbed as he—in his life for Barry to carpe diem squeeze his way into something more comfortable than the skin he’s felt numb and unnerved in for so many years.
Twenty-three years later, audiences are still reaping all the benefits. Cinema Arts patrons can purchase their tickets online: $16 for the public, $10 for members.
“My grandfather passed away when I was a kid. That night, when all the relatives were coming over to my house to pay their respects, I was somehow in my room watching a Jerry Lewis movie… and I was laughing,” Sandler recalled at Cannes while promoting “Punch-Drunk Love” alongside PTA and co-stars Emily Watson and the late Philip Seymor Hoffman.
“I felt really guilty about laughing,” he added. “My father and my uncle said, ‘That’s what he’s there for. Movies are there to cheer you up.’ So he’s always been a big part of my heart. I always love when a Jerry Lewis movie comes on.”
PTA—who also wrote and directed “Boogie Nights,” “There Will Be Blood” and “Licorice Pizza”—next plugs the Thomas Pynchon-inspired “One Battle After Another” with Leonardo DiCaprio for an IMAX theatrical release this September.
Sandler has “Happy Gilmore 2” and “Jay Kelly” set for Netflix in 2025 as well.
See you at the movies.