Too much fun

Paul Thomas Anderson's film could be called a romantic light comedy. But it feels deliberately assembled for this director's cult followers from bits and pieces of the Art House Movie Kit.

In a cinder-block warehouse somewhere in Utah, selling unbreakable bathroom plungers, Barry Egan wears a powder-blue suit; witnesses an inexplicable car crash outside; takes delivery of an unwanted harmonium plonked down from a mystery truck by an unseen driver; has ambitions to buy 12,000 pudding mixes for the sake of the air-miles coupons on them; is nagged by his seven bossy sisters; gets entrapped by a phone-sex "therapist" is beaten up by her white-trash brother and vents his inner rage by frequently vandalising restaurant lavatories.

Barry is played by Adam Sandler. Now, several of these elements are very funny; but the arbitrariness of all of them suggests a script pasted together by a sly film-maker to provide the rudiments of a semi-surreal comedy that exists from minute to minute, but eludes any attempt to impose a convincing unity on it.

Why, for instance, a harmonium? Why not a rhinoceros? The absurdist concoction possesses the staginess of an Ionesco play of 50 years ago folded into the technical precision of today's Steadicam photography and incorporating abstract designs in throbbing psychedelic tints as punctuation points in the tale.

The soundtrack, too, is obsessively percussive. Threatening eruptions of

natural noises alternate with romantic melodies. The whole over-contrived effect creates an environment of eccentricity: anything can happen next, and sometimes does. Sandler, however, is well served by a film he might have sponsored in order to reinvent himself for the audience that's finished high school.

His line in juvenile scatology, which usually drives him to the wall for a pee, is sanitised by his character's inner child, a male virgin who's brought to maturity by the altruistic ministrations of Emily Watson, cast in the same mode as the missionary whore she played in Breaking the Waves, only sweet and winsome instead of raw and erotic.

Punch-Drunk Love - what ever does the title mean? - is an oddity, and knows it. It set out to be exactly that. It will amuse some of the people some of the time.

Punch-Drunk Love
Cert: cert15