Adam Sandler and "The Pudding Guy"
Matthew Ralph

Prior to release of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film Punch-Drunk Love the conversation between filmgoers talking about the latest movie Adam Sandler was starring in usually took about ten seconds to explain.

"It's an Adam Sandler movie" was all that one would have to say to elicit either an agreeable laugh or a dismayed frown, depending on what the fellow movie goer thought of the comic's movies that have numbered so frequent in their repeated pitting of Sandler in similar idiotically precarious positions.

Whether playing an irresponsible city guy who somehow ends up a father, a Creole water boy that ends up the star football player, a tough-nosed talent less hockey player that takes on golf and gets into fisticuffs with Bob Barker along the way, or an irresponsible twenty something forced to return to elementary school and work his way up to earn a high school diploma, Sandler has become synonymous with playing oddball characters removed from their normal setting to create peculiar havoc and laughter.

And while similar factors are at work for Sandler in the latest offering by the 32-year-old Anderson, who has long had the critics wrapped around his finger with films like Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia, it requires a much broader and complicated explanation.
Like his other work, one almost immediately falls into a stutter when trying to explain the synopsis of the film, leaving the "It's a PT Anderson film" cop-out the only viable explanation, which for the countless people who have never heard of Hard Eight, dismissed Boogie Nights because of a character's revealing of a certain body part and the overall sexual content and failed to get through to the second VHS tape of Magnolia, doesn't do much good.

But if you were to start with Sandler's character and explain that he plays a fictionalized version of David Phillips, affectionately known as "The Pudding Guy" for collecting a remarkable 12,150 cups of Healthy Choice pudding in order to redeem 1.5 million frequent flyer miles from a promotion they ran three years ago and take his family on a European vacation, you might not shock too many people. That Sandler would play a peculiar character like that would not come as a surprise.

But just as Anderson used Biblical text and Old Testament plagues as merely a suggestion for his film Magnolia, the story about Phillips sets one small piece of the movie into motion. In fact, by the time the emotionally distressed Barry Egan discovers a catch in the Healthy Choice promotion that can earn him millions of free flyer miles, the film has already sucked the viewer into a series of random and subtlety humorous plot devices.

Egan after all has little in common with Phillips, whose story in the March 27, 2000 issue of Time magazine set Anderson's mind and incredible imagination into motion. Egan is a single, thirty-something entrepreneur, trying to live practically and keep his head above water managing a small gadget business (think of those catalogs that often end up in the bathroom hocking leg warmers). He has seven abusive sisters who ridicule and egg on the deep emotional damage that has most likely come partly from the trauma of being the lone male in a full house.

His late arrival at a family birthday party, which his sisters all individually bug him about at work earlier in the day, quickly prompts ridicule and the telling of an embarrassing story about Egan throwing a hammer through a window while trying to build a doghouse. Before long, the murmurs and the laughter of a full room of people all talking about Egan leads him to one of his outbursts that ends in the shattering of two patio windows.

With that the mood of the party is destroyed and the twisted, complex and neurotic side of Egan is fully displayed. One of the film's most emotional moments, Sandler then turns in perhaps one of the most poignant moments of his career when he says to his brother-in-law, the dentist, "Sometimes, I just don't like myself." Like the pathetic former child quiz show champ character played by William H. Macy in Magnolia, Egan's hopelessness is only further demonstrated by him asking the dentist for help, explaining to him that he will often cry for no reason before going into another emotional outburst, this time crying uncontrollably.

Unable to find comfort in his attempted cry for help, which he later denies when confronted by his sister about it, Egan reaches out to the most debase source of companionship available with a credit card number. He calls a phone sex hotline, discovering the number underneath an ad for a Healthy Choice coupon. From compulsively buying pudding to earn flyer miles without any intention or clue of where to travel to phoning a sex chat line simply to have someone to talk to, one seriously begins to doubt how together, if at all, the hero of the story.

And skating on such thin ice, nearing a probable breakdown, as Egan is at this point, the most difficult aspect of the script takes shape in the form of Lena Leonard (the alliteration of the name alone suggests sexy), who quickly becomes a love interest for the socially inept Egan at the most improbable of times. What's ironic and tragic is that she re-enters his life precisely at the time when stacks of pudding sit outside of his office, a harmonium that fell off a truck into the street prior to their first meeting sits on his desk, and he talks on the phone with a phone sex operator demanding he send her money for rent.

Why a woman so seemingly together and so strikingly beautiful would immediately fall for Egan (a co-worker of Egan's closest sister, she sees a picture of him, prompting her to attempt a meeting with him at the beginning of the movie by bringing her car to the auto shop next door before it opens) never does seem to add up.

Regardless, the peculiar relationship that ensues only adds to the whimsical beauty of the film, which unlike Anderson's previous efforts plays pretty well straightforward throughout and for the most part avoids the complicated web of players and deep character development characterized in previous work.

The occasional break in the action and interludes of artistic splashes of color on the screen, as if to represent a scene change in a stage play, often throws the viewer for a loop, but the love story, as awkward and subtly unpredictable as the dialogue often is, succeeds in its pure artistry. With each embrace onscreen, the two characters seem a better fit, even if Watson's well-traveled British divorcee character never does reveal much beyond the fact that she travels frequently for business.

In the end, as the curtain closes and the random loose ends tie neatly into a bow only Anderson could manage to create, questions linger about what, in a logical universe would happen next, but all the same the film carries the weight of its own creation and in the end makes good on a simple idea that spawned into a complicated love story that no amount of description could ever fully explain.

posted 10.24.02

2002 White Elephant Productions