Punch-Drunk Love Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)October 11th, 2002
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Paul Thomas Anderson, the twice-Oscar-nominated writer/director of films like Magnolia and Boogie Nights, is back with a film inspired by '40s Technicolor musicals which features a lead role written specifically for Adam Sandler. Sounds like a train wreck, don't it? Well, Punch-Drunk Love is anything but. While it's nowhere as demanding or profound as his previous films, Love might still be a bit challenging if you've been watching shit like Sweet Home Alabama for the last two months.
It's rare for a mainstream picture to be this brashly poetic, and Anderson is completely unapologetic about it. Love is less than half the length of Magnolia, though it still has its share of long, ballsy tracking shots, a spot-on score (courtesy of Jon Brion) and familiar San Fernando Valley setting. Anderson devotees might miss Robert Elswit's usually pristine cinematography (he's back this time, but photographs everything in a very different way), the huge ensemble cast and hip tune selection, but Anderson makes up for it by replacing those things with brilliant color schemes and set decorations, as well as a newfound ability to mess with viewers' heads by manipulating the sound. Hey, there's a reason why he won the Best Director award at Cannes this year.
Anderson's script takes Sandler's one-dimensional character from The Waterboy and turns him into an even unlikelier hero who is (gasp!) fully developed - a word that previously applied to the Sandler oeuvre as "law-abiding" does to Randy Moss. Sandler (Mr. Deeds) plays Barry Egan, a salesman whose wares include novelty plungers. Barry is a self-loather who constantly finds himself lying to get out of the messes created by his frighteningly funny physical outbursts. He has serious anger management issues, often going from zero to 60 in no time...and with very little reason.
It seems like every time Barry pokes his head out of his Valley warehouse, something bad and weird happens. For example, early in the film, there's a scene involving a car flipping over right in front of him (bad), followed by a van pulling up to the curb, tossing out a harmonium and taking off again (weird). The harmonium - a metaphor for Barry's life - is played by his seven nitpicking sisters who would probably cause anyone to be a violent agoraphobic. When one of them insists that he date one of her co-workers, Barry finds the dogs of love nipping at his heels. But first, his life gets a lot more chaotic.
Part of Love deals with Barry's discovery of a marketing loophole that enables him to earn frequent flier miles by the thousands even though he's never once set foot on a plane (that particular thread is based on a true story). Another part pits him against a shady Provo phone-sex company run by a mattress salesman (Anderson regular Philip Seymour Hoffman) who blackmails him into handing over hundreds of dollars. And, of course, there's the extremely unusual romance with the intentionally underdeveloped Lena Leonard (Emily Watson, Hoffman's Red Dragon costar), which comes to fruition in Hawaii with the greatest and most memorable screen kiss in years (or at least since Amélie). Somewhere in there, Anderson finds several opportunities to work in "He Needs Me" - Olive Oyl's ballad from Robert Altman's Popeye. Like Popeye, Barry is a mild-mannered guy who becomes incredibly violent when you push the right buttons (or mess with his woman).
Other than being fleshed out, Barry isn't too much different from any other Sandler role, which makes it all the more shocking when we realize how unbelievably sad those characters are when you strip away the frenzied Jerry Lewis hysterics (it's like somebody flipped the "manic" switch on Sandler's back). This isn't his go at a Jim Carrey-like attempt to court Oscar. We feel Barry's rage when his sisters call him "gay boy," and we swoon when he faces down his enemy, saying, "I have a love in my life, and it gives me more strength than you could ever understand" - a line nearly as cheesy as Barry's blue suit.
But that cheesiness is part of Love's charm. Anderson is the type of director who throws le fromage into the mix just because he can. Thankfully, that's not all he incorporates. I'll probably need two or three more viewings to catch every homage, tongue-in-cheek nod and subtle gag. The humor here is even more unconventional than what we've come to expect from him (check out the restaurant scene where Anderson cuts in for the punch line of a joke we didn't hear, or the bizarre threats made during their first sexual encounter). And nobody but Tarantino uses the widescreen to the same effect as Anderson. It's downright breathtaking to watch a director at the top of his game the way he is.
1:29 - R for strong language including a scene of sexual dialogue
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