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Film
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Punch-Drunk Love
Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson turns Adam Sandler into a dramatic actor as he serves up a quirky romantic comedy that will makes you believe true love is possible - even after the realities and disappointments of real life have defeated adolescent ideals.
Friday, October 11, 2002
By Todd Gilchrist
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There are filmmakers and films that transport us away from ourselves into parallel or alternate universes, transform our expectations of reality and thrill us with stories we never imagined were possible. Those are filmmakers of true vision determined to redefine our world and provide a glorious, exuberant escape from the hoi polloi of daily life. Paul Thomas Anderson is not this kind of filmmaker; not because he lacks vision, and not because he’s disinterested in creating a complete and specific world in his films.
Anderson does quite nearly the opposite; simply put, his films seek to create our world, to find the poetry and potential of everyday existence and celebrate it, and in so doing infecting the audience with such exhilaration that their lives seem brighter and more hopeful for having seen his work. They remind us that a good day or a good friend or just being nice and getting nice in return can be every bit as liberating and satisfying as scoring the game-winning touchdown or thwarting the foulest adversary. Punch-Drunk Love, his latest effort, concentrates those reassuring feelings, imbuing them with the curious idiosyncrasy and expectation and desperation of anyone’s worst fears, and speaks a gospel of love that softens the heart and inspires the will.
The film stars Adam Sandler in his finest role to date as Barry Egan, a hapless emotional cripple whose seven sisters have emasculated his ability to express himself emotionally. Arriving at the crack of dawn at work to call a client, pathetically offering his home number in an attempt to maintain some semblance of social interaction with others, Barry finds a miniature piano mysteriously left on the street and takes it into his office. As his sisters successively call one after another to invite him to a family gathering, he plunks on they keys instead of explaining himself directly, using the odd notes and incomplete compositions as some middle ground of articulation between his naturally (or in this case perhaps nurtureally) diminutive personality and the cathartic release of his violent outbursts. When his sister Elizabeth (Mary Lynn Rajskub) shows up at his job with a new friend, co-worker Lena (Emily Watson) in tow, she tries to set the two up, not realizing that her disclosures of Barry’s history - much less of his current confusion - only exacerbate his emotional instability. Despite Elizabeth’s awkward fumbling with the set-up, both Barry and Lena detect some potential chemistry and secretly set up their own date.
Barry’s new hobby simultaneously occupies his thoughts: he finds a loophole in a food company promotion and begins exponentially collecting pudding cups which he intends to redeem for frequent-flyer mileage (never mind that Barry never flies). A 900- number operator in whom he sought comfort and companionship becomes increasingly aggressive with blackmail demands that he pay her in exchange for silence about his phone sex solicitation, and his attempts to cancel his credit card and refuse her calls is met with violence which he is neither able to reciprocate nor defend himself from. He continues to focus his thoughts on Lena, whose simple straightforwardness (much less her disclosed lack of siblings) he finds attractive as he considers a romantic relationship, and fights to keep these worlds of light and darkness from colliding, even as his emotional stability fluctuates between abject happiness and blinding despair.
The elements of tragedy aren’t life and death issues in this movie, and Anderson’s film wisely contains itself to the microcosm of this one man’s beleaguered existence. The phone-sex subplot initially seems to create a dynamic, dramatic contradiction to the comedic elements of the story between Barry and Lena, suggesting imminent tragedies befalling a pitiful protagonist who seeks nothing more than the most minimal human contact. When the blackmailers turn out to be more bark than bite, a distant threat from a blue-collar swindler, we realize that his peril is based on our identification of his fear of being discovered, or his emotional vulnerability (and our own), rather than some cinematic conceit about the seemingly indefatigable resources of an organized criminal, especially when in fact the truth in real life is much closer to Anderson’s fictional creation here of a disorganized group of brothers hired as muscle for a wannabe street tough.
To praise Anderson’s career is to accept his creative eccentricities, and his stories’ unexplainable twists at face value. Few filmmakers’ work possess such a consistent and compelling sense of purity, and Punch-Drunk Love is an amalgam of uniquely odd ideas which cohere much better than one might expect, and better still as an afterthought than it might seem while you’re watching. It isn’t the immediate struggle Barry endures to find love and relieve his pent-up feelings that we identify with, but merely the sensation that we don’t always have that person to confide in or express ourselves to that we’d like, and it’s a triumph in no small terms to find one. This is Anderson’s triumph, too - to make abstract the concrete elements of his characters’ conflict in such a way that they are applicable and accessible to all. Barry’s constant, relentless mothering by his sisters has left him emotionally paralyzed, incapable of articulating himself and his feelings, and desperate to find a person - much less a girlfriend - who accepts his flaws without questioning or berating him.
Anderson’s love for his characters translates easily to the audience because he acknowledges their idiosyncrasies and weaknesses rather than dismissing them, and yet refuses to use them to exclusively define the characters (much like the contradictions existent in real personalities do not necessarily comprise the whole of a person). He transforms Sandler’s screen persona, that of an immature man-child misfit, into a poignant and sympathetic character without removing the familiarity of what we’ve come to expect from the comedian. The rage of Happy Gilmore and the supplicant deference of The Waterboy are both to be found in Barry, except they now evoke different dimensions of a real personality rather than sketching a caricature that we’re simply supposed to find emptily funny.
On the other hand, Emily Watson as Lena is mercifully bereft of explanations, baggage or the kinds of imminently tragic background details of her earlier roles (among them Breaking The Waves and Hilary And Jackie) and is presented straightforwardly as a woman who is clearly happy to give attention to another person without pause or reflection, and who can find satisfaction in the actuality of a companion’s personality rather than some impossible or imagined ideal.
| Romantic comedies are both blessed and cursed by reducing the infinite number of personality types to a select few, suggesting the universality of our plights for attention and romantic interaction. Anderson searches for the extremes of personality types, or at least exaggerates them within the confines of plausibility, and uncovers a truly compatible pair without making the guy a soggy lap dog or the girl a beer-guzzling tomboy who just happens to look dynamite in stiletto heels. Barry and Lena don’t like the same obscure 1969 French film or share a passion for taxidermy; there is relatively little memorable dialogue between them, and most of it is the banal pleasantries of getting-to-know-you first date type exchanges.
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Instead, like many or most lasting real-life relationships, they fit together more like two puzzle pieces, discovering that their compatibility is based on complementary rather than shared personality traits. There is a courting scene midway through the film in which Lena make polite but pointless conversation about his childhood, the eccentricities (weirdness) of which have been detailed at length by his sister, who purported to set them up in the first place (and who is unaware that they have gotten together). Barry excuses himself and proceeds to tear apart the restaurant bathroom in frustration. When the maitre’d ejects him from the restaurant, Barry acquires a threadbare excuse for leaving and she promptly leaves with him, asking no questions or even expressing some visible sign of internal doubt. Who doesn’t seek that in a mate, the forgiveness of a potentially humiliating situation, without skepticism or interrogation?
| Versatility is always the criteria that ultimately proves a director’s mettle, and in terms of subject matter Anderson does not diverge significantly from the emotional paths he followed in his earlier films. In Punch-Drunk Love, the director has adapted his visual style from the sweeping operatic storytelling of his most ambitious work, Magnolia, and reverted to a successfully more intimate display of human interaction similar to that in Hard Eight, though this time he fills the screen with bold primary colors and juxtaposes the blinding brightness of the outside world with the more muted tones of Barry’s repressed life, which throughout the film begins to explode with vibrancy (culminating in an intoxicating trip to the picturesque beaches of Hawaii). Longtime collaborator Jon Brion’s score complements the tonal shifts of the film, invading the characters’ space unobtrusively except to punctuate the moments of unpleasantness or celebration, and is as effective in its minimalism here as the orchestral pomp he created for Magnolia, elevating that film’s interwoven storylines to Shakespearean melodrama.
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While countless auteurs and filmmakers attempt to capture the dynamism of the proverbial “slice of life,” some vignette that encapsulates the entirety of human experience and provides some profound insight, Paul Thomas Anderson has limited his spectrum of content and arrived at a greater truth than can be easily and more facetiously derived from manipulative, lowest-common-denominator Hollywood pap. The film’s optimism is contagious, invigorating the audience with giddiness, excitement, and hope in a way that few others ever attempt, and even fewer succeed. Punch-Drunk Love is the kind of movie that makes you believe true love is possible - even after the realities and disappointments of real life have defeated your adolescent ideals - if only you’re willing to wait a little while for it.
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