I’m not an Adam Sandler fan. I will admit I do somewhat like some of his Saturday Night Live work, but most of the movies he makes show a loud man-child doing goofy stuff with his usual co-stars, often in exotic locations like he’s mostly taking a working vacation with this same people all the time. As comedy goes, it isn’t really my thing. But then, every so often, Sandler seems to try something different and puts some real effort into a movie that shows he has talent that he just doesn’t utilize as much as he could.
That’s the only explanation I can come up with as to why he made a movie with director Paul Thomas Anderson, the man who gave us works like Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, and Phantom Thread. Those aren’t the sorts of movie you would normally associate with Sandler, but then again, neither is Punch-Drunk Love and there he is all the same.
Sandler stars as Barry Egan, owner of a novelty plunger business, and the unmarried brother to seven loud, opinionated and married sisters. Barry is quiet for the most part, bottling up whatever emotions he has, until it comes boiling out in random acts of violence and vandalism against the nearest convenient inanimate objects. One of his sisters, Elizabeth (Mary Lynn Rajskub), has a co-worker named Lena (Emily Watson) that she thinks would be a good match for Barry. However, before that happens, Barry calls a phone sex line and the woman on the other end of the line keeps calling back and demanding money under the reasoning that Barry is a pervert and successful, so he must have it. True, Barry doesn’t, but this woman has Barry’s credit card information, phone number, address, and real name as a result of his call, so she isn’t above telling her boss (Philip Seymour Hoffman) about that and sending four of her brothers off to deal with Barry in person.
As it is, Barry and Lena do meet and actually hit it off. Barry may finally have a solution for his chronic loneliness, the thing that causes him to occasionally lash out and make poor decisions. Then again, Barry found a loophole to a food company’s frequent flier mile give away that has him buying tons of pudding, and that’s not getting into how he discovered a working harmonium in the street, so this is perhaps that kind of movie. Everything that happens is absurdist, but it ends happily for Barry once he finally starts telling the truth and dealing with Hoffman and his crew.
Anyone who thinks they know what an Adam Sandler movie looks like will probably be surprised by this. While it isn’t uncommon for Sandler to play characters capable of loud outbursts of rage, this is the anger of an adult and not a child in an adult’s body. True, his outbursts aren’t healthy, but at least they’re for “grown up” reasons of being overlooked by his family, abused by strangers, and generally not being as successful as he’d like to be. That he spends most of the movie wearing the same blue suit suggests something about how he is feigning success he doesn’t have, and that is what gets him in so much trouble with the sex hotline extortionists.
The result of this is Anderson has made a rather absurdist movie. Much of what happens here isn’t necessarily outlandish so much as unlikely. For example, Lena and Barry’s sex talk is anything but sexy, and yet it somehow turns them both on. The two get a happy ending despite the best efforts of both Barry’s attackers and even Barry’s sister at one point, but much of the movie is more about what Barry will do for love. And the answer there is, he’ll basically stop letting people push him around and he’ll stop avoiding all his problems and deal with it head-on, even if that means driving to Utah to have it out with the owner of a mattress store. I’m still not necessarily an Adam Sandler fan, but movies like this are all the bigger tragedy because it shows what he can do but for whateve reason chooses not to.
Grade: B+
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