“Punch Drunk Love” Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson ****
Yes, Adam Sandler is great. This coming from someone who despises most of Sandler’s pre-pubescent comedy. Then again, “Punch-Drunk Love” is not a comedy…it’s a love story. Well, it’s a love story with comic elements and some violence and suspense. Paul Thomas Anderson’s (“Magnolia,” Boogie Nights”) latest film, goes against the grain of a typical genre film and does so in spectacular fashion.
In the opening scene, the protagonist, Barry Egan (Adam Sandler), sips on coffee as he watches a car flip (car crashes are quickly becoming a theme in Anderson’s work, but more on that later) and watches someone drop off a fixable harmonium, which comes to parallel Barry himself. To summarize very briefly, Barry buys pudding, calls a phone sex line, and meets a girl.
We quickly understand Barry’s shy and scared character. We meet Barry’s seven sisters, all of whom treat Barry with contempt and are constantly meddling with his life. It is because of this fear of women and of human contact in general, that Barry, tries a phone sex company. This, unfortunately for Barry leads to the phone sex company (run by Phillip Seymour Hoffman out of Utah) trying to blackmail Barry into giving them money. All this while Barry is pursued by Lena Leonard (Emily Watson) while he pursues a promotional offer which would give him thousands of air miles if he just buys enough pudding.
Barry is a socially inept man, who, at times completely loses his composure and starts to smash things. Strange? Definitely, and very few directors could pull it off. Anderson does without the film ever feeling pretentious, a feat in itself. The one problem I had with the film, and it may be just me, is that I never bought Lena’s pursuit of Barry. Lena may be a little odd, but Barry is well… not well, mentally.
Still, the movie works and Anderson, as much as any other director, is willing to take risks. Anderson has also become the director of Los Angeles. More than any other director, he seems to understand the contradictions of that city as well as the difficulty in it of making connections. That is where the cars come in. Los Angeles is comprised of roads and parking lots. The cities that make up Los Angeles are connected by highway, and only accessible by car. Just as in “Magnolia”, the streets in “Punch-Drunk Love” seem empty.
In a scene where four men attack Barry, there is no one around. He runs and runs. There is no one around anywhere. A city of 12 million people and the streets are empty. The isolation of the characters is further emphasized by the camera. Barry is consistently shot running to and from the camera down long empty hallways. He is also shot often in silhouette, which demonstrates Barry’s feelings towards himself. “Sometimes, I don’t like myself” he tells his brother-in-law after smashing the glass in a sister’s house. One thing about this film is that you can never tell what is coming next. Somehow the film seems like a dream — with its emptiness and strange events — but the unpredictability of the characters is very real.
The acting is tremendous. Who knew that Sandler had this sort of ability in him? Emily Watson and Phillip Seymour Hoffman are excellent as always. Luis Guzman has become one of my very favourite character actors. (A favourite of Anderson’s as well.) The film is not perfect, but it is still excellent. Strangely, after two Anderson films around the three-hour mark, “Punch-Drunk Love” is only an hour and a half and feels, perhaps, a little too short. The ending is a little abrupt. Still, Anderson is one of the few directors worth seeing regardless of actors, script, or length of film.
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