"Punch-Drunk Love", written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (2002)

You can't look at a 2x3 inch photo of a Mark Rothko painting and understand what it's all about; you have to stand right up next to it so that its color blocks surround you and seep into you. You can't analyze it, you can only feel it. You have to let it trigger your emotions. In a quiet gallery with no one else around, caught it the right mood, it can be overwhelming and even frightening.

That's what this movie is like. It sounds irritatingly quirky down on paper -- a guy with an anger management/punching problem runs a business from a warehouse, buys a harmonium, obsessively saves pudding UPC codes in a scheme to win a vacation, and falls in love with a mysterious woman. And he has seven nasty sisters. And he's Adam Sandler. I hate it already.

But wait -- the woman is played by the luminous Emily Watson, a uniquely powerful actress who looks like she could eat you whole, delicately pick you bones, and smile about it afterwards. Adam Sandler's channels his blatent discomfort in his own skin into this repressed and unhappy character so perfectly that his propensity for infantilizing his other characters suddenly makes sense. He'd be too vulnerable and heartbreaking otherwise. And there's a phone sex call that goes horribly wrong, thank God, because we know or at least suspect that the world is full of lonely people and/or people who are out to get you.

I was bawling by the end of this film. Life is very, very difficult and those who rise to the challenge of living it embody a courage so banal as to be invisible most of the time. This movie reminds us of that and of the balm of kindness and love that redeems even the most fucked up of us.

I don't think this movie did very well at the box office -- I'm sure PTA fans were thinking, Where are the boobies? Where are the frog storms? Where's Tom Cruise acting crazy before we even knew he was crazy? But Anderson did something remarkable with this movie -- he put naked emotion on screen, and at the same time, he acknowledged how ridiculous it is, and how we are victims of our own tragic humanness.

I can't wait to see what he does next.