ell, here it is: the New Adam Sandler Movie. Excited? Well, probably not. But you see, this isn’t just any Adam Sandler movie; there are no funny accents or references to sports. You don’t even have to be high to enjoy it. It’s “Adam Sandler As You’ve Never Seen Him Before.” If you’re not excited yet, you’re probably over the age of...twelve.


Seriously, though, you should be excited. It’s been a dismal year thus far. But for those who would lament the passing of independent-minded filmmaking, there is a veritable potpourri of mouthwatering releases on the way in the next few months: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, scripted by Being John Malkovich’s Charlie Kaufman, which tells Gong Show host Chuck Barris’s secret life as a CIA assassin, Steven Soderbergh’s remake of sci-fi epic, Solaris, and Peter Jackson’s second Lord of the Rings installment, The Two Towers among them. And then, of course, there’s Punch Drunk Love, the new Adam Sandler movie, which, in case you’re still not excited, is written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.


Few contemporary filmmakers can wake us from our grumpy slumber as P.T. Anderson can. Anderson virtually came out of nowhere with his second film, the porn-industry opera Boogie Nights, an instant classic with the swagger and coke-addled thrill of Goodfellas’ final act, but also a compassion that Scorcese could never imagine. Boogie Nights’ follow-up, the widescreen Magnolia, also featured a cast of lovable losers, who, if not particularly smart, were always sympathetic – often painfully so.


For lovers of Anderson’s work, who can forget the sadness in the eyes of William H. Macy’s hangdog Little Bill in Boogie Nights, humiliated by a wife hell-bent on experiencing the sexual revolution a hundred times over? Or John C. Reilly’s sweet, empathetic cop in Magnolia wooing the broken beauty of Melora Walters’ Claudia? The list goes on, but almost invariably in a P.T. Anderson film, characters find themselves to be messed-up adults, decent people, still reeling from the violence of childhood. (Granted, this is hardly something you’d associate with Adam Sandler. When I say “violence,” you’re still thinking “Bob Barker.” But bear with me.) If you’ve seen any of his movies, you know that Anderson is heavy, but not overly so. They always have an optimistic looking-up-from-the-bottom-of-the-well quality at their center.


Punch Drunk Love, starring our hero, Adam Sandler, is no exception. In many ways, it’s Anderson’s least expansive undertaking yet—a romantic comedy even—that’s a return to the spirit of Anderson’s intimate debut, the underrated Hard Eight. It’s also Anderson’s riskiest and most experimental film to date. Embedding the director’s gift for warm empathy in a bizarro-surrealism and heavy-handed symbolism that were only tangentially important to Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love finds Anderson pushing the limits again, this time with the heretofore-untapped dramatic potential of Sandler (The Wedding Singer doesn’t count, guys).


And therein lies what would seem to be the biggest risk of the film. Conventional wisdom says that if Punch Drunk Love is an artistic risk for Anderson, it’s a blind leap into the unknown for Sandler – a pathetic lurch at credibility for an actor who has thus far been content to be our generation’s Cheech and Chong. And, in truth, it is downright bizarre that Sandler has opted to follow a string of films utterly devoid of artistic integrity with a film that’s virtually all artistic integrity.


So does the gambit pay off? Well, that depends on your perspective. Those who can own the guitar tablature for “The Hanukkah Song” won’t likely care much for Punch Drunk Love, though that’s not to say they shouldn’t. The plot follows shy, repressed small business owner Barry Egan (Sandler) who lives in one of those Hollywood suburb netheregions that Anderson is famous for. To say Barry’s a social misfit is an understatement; the poor guy can hardly say hello to one of his seven overbearing sisters before they humiliate and browbeat him to tears. But one day, outside his business, he meets Lena (Emily Watson), a forward, fresh-faced, corporate traveler looking for a human connection.


It’s a setting that takes us down a familiar path: awkward meeting, glorious hook-up, will-they-or won’t-they third act. And as he showed in Big Daddy and The Wedding Singer, Sandler’s certainly capable at navigating that kind of material. But it only takes the first, puzzling scene to know this is a Paul Thomas Anderson film featuring Adam Sandler, not the other way around.


For all of its rom-com conventions, the director tells Barry’s story intent on frustrating the audience’s expectations at every turn, at times, willfully underdeveloping plotlines, scenes and characters. Most of the time, the bold strokes that replace them are enough. Sometimes they aren’t. In particular, Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s blow-dried, malevolent mattress salesman feels like a character left out of Mullholland Drive’s final cut – his story has a dramatic function, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. And Watson’s character is wafer thin – we never figure out what someone as attractive, sociable and financially-set as Lena sees in Barry, who at times seems dangerously lost and—a first for Anderson—unsympathetic. Despite her obvious chemistry with him, Lena’s own desperation is barely hinted at.


But, as Anderson makes clear, Punch Drunk Love is the story of Barry’s path to redemption, as he finds his way through infinitely winding mazes of apartment buildings and endless frozen foods sections at the grocery store to discover the magnificent splendor of love in Hawaii. Most of the symbolism—the broken harmonium Barry is learning to play, the letters carved into Barry’s knuckles—moves that story along, and is easily understood with a little thought. They’re simply ways adult-child Barry sees his world.


That childlike sense is reinforced throughout, most brilliantly in an extended sequence cued to Harry Nilsson’s “He Needs Me” from Robert Altman’s much-derided Popeye musical. Even the most cursory viewing of any of Anderson’s previous works reveals an unabashed lover of popular music (and, if you count his girlfriend Fiona Apple, pop musicians). Here, as the soundtrack to Barry gearing up to find true love at last, he makes a masterful song choice: innocent and whimsical, but also strangely repetitive, almost to the point of neurotic obsession. Sung by Shelley Duvall’s Olive Oyl, it’s how Barry wants Lena to see him, and it’s perfect.


There is a lot to enjoy here, including some killer comedy, with Anderson’s dialog as biting as ever and a running joke about pudding that’s infinitely more rewarding than it sounds. Really, the details are almost too numerous to mention: Bob Elswit’s cubist cinematography, the contrasts in violence inflicted by “The Brothers” and “The Sisters,” and great cameos by Robert (Triumph the Insult Comic Dog) Smigel and the typically-hilarious Luis Guzman. And Hawaii has never looked so inviting.


Ok, so onto the big question: is Adam Sandler actually good? Unequivocally: yes. Without hesitation. But not in the way you might think. Rest assured, he is funny. At times, very funny. But in a much more desperate way than we’re used to. Even though Punch Drunk Love is miles away from anything he’s done to date, one of the most intriguing things about Sandler’s performance is how he doesn’t undergo a Robin Williams-style career transformation to become Barry. For the most part, Sandler’s the same sweet angry, awkward lug he was in, well, every film he’s done. Wearing a royal blue suit that looks like it was lifted from the Alamo Rent-A-Car sales department, Barry channels that sweet, sad capable-of-flying-off-into-a-rage energy he’s had in every movie. But that’s ok. Even if you never forget that you’re watching “the guy who did Little Nicky” (and I didn’t), Sandler’s persona never gets in the way. It’s one of the film’s greatest assets and, thus, a pleasant surprise.


Ultimately, Punch Drunk Love may not be the easiest film to love—it’s too willfully subversive for that—but that not to say it isn’t extremely rewarding. In fact, part of the movie’s charm is how Anderson is always throwing twists and curveballs to keep us uncomfortably off-kilter. It’s decidedly less visceral than his earlier work, which, at times, felt almost too agreeably chewy, as if we were being entertained by the misery and stupidity of others. Anderson makes no such mistake here, with Sandler’s palpable pain never far from the surface, but shot through a prism of Willy Wonka surrealism. The result is a brave experiment – a film that’s always engaging, but frequently uncomfortable. Like the bright, vivid colors Anderson cuts in periodically, Punch Drunk Love is unpredictable, unsettling and—when you think about it—a little psychedelic even.


And that’s something Sandler fans can dig, I assure you.