SANDLER, SERIOUSLY

摘要

Say You're A College Sophomore and you've been assigned to write a thesis on the art of comedy. Like many an industrious student in the information age, you go to the Internet and purchase one. On a website that sells dissertations and theses, you comb through papers on Moliere, Chaucer and Shakespeare until you find one you like: "Adam Sandler's Big Daddy: Utopian Qualities and Social Propaganda," a bargain at just under $200. It begins, "The impracticality of Utopian qualities as they exist in the movie Big Daddy is a decidedly obvious deduction... [Big Daddy] speaks to the grave deficit in man's quest to define human happiness." It goes on for 12 more pages, using some mighty fancy words to describe the cultural resonance of Sandler's 1999 hit, in which he befriends a little boy and shows the kid how to urinate against a wall. Critics might want to start downloading because with Punch-Drunk Love (see review), the cultural significance of Sandier's work has become a serious proposition. In his new movie, Sandier plays a plunger salesman who dreams of escaping his banal existence via frequent-flyer miles. As far as romantic comedies go, it's very strange, which is what you would expect from director Paul Thomas Anderson of Magnolia and Boogie Nights. What you don't expect is an art film starring Sandier, whose lowbrow comedies have earned nearly $400 million since 1998 and have made him an idol of teenage boys, a cult figure on college campuses and a punch line for dismissive film critics. Punch-Drunk Love―for which Anderson received a best-director award at Cannes―is making the dumb-and-dumber Sandier persona seem smart and smarter.