Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
I’ve decided to pull a Charles Foster Kane and end BC’s tribute to Paul Thomas Anderson with a review by the returning Travis Bjorklund. This series needed a little sour to my sweet, and Travis is more than willing to fill the bill. For my opinion, reverse basically everything that follows.
What do you say about your favorite living filmmaker’s most trivial work? This P.T. Anderson picture is an intimate one, with no grand ambitions. Punch-Drunk Love, aptly titled, is about the redemptive power of love, and how love can be inexplicable even to those involved. Though memorable sporadically and beautiful consistently, Anderson never pulls it all together.
It’s essentially a story pastiche, with the major subplots seem only shoehorned in because Anderson thought it would be fun to put them in a movie. As you watch the film, you can see the gears in Anderson ’s head turning:
I heard about this guy who earned millions of cheap air miles from buying pudding…I’d love to put that in a movie. You know, the movies never deal fairly with regular people who dial sex hotlines…I’d love to put that in a movie. Adam Sandler has such great dramatic potential…I’d love to put that in a movie. I’ve never been to Hawaii …
Punch-Drunk Love is the story of Barry Egan, a lonely and frustrated but otherwise nice guy. He has seven overbearing sisters and a struggling business. He vents his frustrations in violent bursts of property destruction. The role of Barry was written for Adam Sandler, and it’s an emasculated twist on the persona Sandler has adopted throughout his career. Considering P.T. Anderson’s penchant for getting career-best work out of actors, it’s no great surprise that Sandler has never given a better performance (For me, that’s not saying much: I don’t share Anderson ’s affinity for the actor). Sandler rocks and paces and tenses his jaw through the movie in a way that adequately displays Barry’s the pent-up potential energy.
Barry begins the story hapless and alone, but quickly meets Lena (Emily Watson) and the two fall crazily, inexplicably in love. Lena, though represented prettily by Watson, is merely a character sketch and exists only to move Barry’s character forward. In fact, Anderson here contrives to reduce all the characters except for Barry to sketch. It’s a perverse move from a filmmaker who has made realistic and interesting characterization his stock and trade. And it is almost certainly a contrivance: Anderson, knowing he has fascinating, well-hewn characters down flat, decided to focus on other things.
Thankfully, those other things mostly deliver: sumptuous use of wide screen to convey loneliness; exploration of visual and aural representation of feelings like frustration, helplessness, passion, being overwhelmed, and love; pregnant atmosphere. Unfortunately, it’s not enough. By the time Barry, empowered by love, takes control of his life and reaches his full potential, most of Anderson ’s machinations have been revealed as smoke and mirrors. While some seem merely pointless, others are confusing: what’s the meaning of the opening car crash, which plays practically like a non sequitur, or the broken harmonium? Most of the time I admire Anderson ’s refusal to explain or contextualize the events of his films, but, in this case, they just feels like filler.
This is a strange, singular, little movie, lazily written and tightly directed. Unfortunately, as Anderson himself said in a recent interview with Charlie Rose, “It all starts with the writing.”
★★½
January 10th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Ouch. That one’s going to leave a mark.
I strenuously disagree, though I also know PDL has a habit of dividing people and there’s a reason: it’s weird.
Either it reaches you personally or it doesn’t. It did for me, but if it hadn’t I can only imagine it’s kind of unbearable.
I don’t care for Adam Sandler, though in fairness I’ve never bothered subjecting myself to all of one of his movies. I’m familiar with his manchild persona however and here I think Anderson channels it for maximum effect and it’s fun to watch.
Also, I’m a sucker for misfit loves stories. As a misfit, they give me hope.
It’s also PTA’s most focused film, eschewing a lot of the crap that people criticize in the 2 films he did after Hard Eight. As such, it’s a perfect bridge to There Will Be Blood and for that alone it deserves at least another half star.
January 11th, 2008 at 3:51 am
CJ-First my aplogies for erasing your comment that praised Travis’s return to the site. I was deleting the spam that plagues me and accidentally deleted that comment in the process.
For those who missed it, Craig said it was good to have Travis back on the site, and I couldn’t agree more.
I confess, I almost edited the phrase “lazily written” from the review, but decided that was unfair. I don’t think that lazy is a matter of opinion though, the idea that Anderson threw this together over a weekend three years after Magnolia and said “allright, that’ll do it” is a little silly to me. PD-L may not work, that is very debatable. But lazy? C’mon.
I would also argue that to call the various things random is to miss the point, everything is supposed to be random, it’s another of Anderson’s experiments with the three act structure. I think a good way into Punchdrunk-Love is to realize that the film is a. about Barry, which Travis has said, but b. told from Barry’s POV. That’s why Lena acts like an alien (Anderson’s words) and explains the strange discords of the film (the car accident, the harmonica, the in and out soundtrack) these all contribute to the see saw nature of Barry’s personality.
Agree CJ that’s its an important step toward There Will Be Blood.
January 12th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Yeah, let me repeat: Welcome back Travis. You’re a credit to the joint even in this case when we don’t see eye to eye.
A Barry’s Eye View of the world is a good way of looking at it Chuck. It’s a world fraught with unseen and unexpected dangers. Of sudden car accidents, mysterious harmoniums, violent sex line operators and alien women.
Barry is like a raw exposed nerve and he fascinates me in a way I never thought Sandler could.
Hell, let’s give ‘er another half star for using He Needs Me from Popeye.
January 13th, 2008 at 4:39 am
I don’t disagree with what you’re saying about this movie, really. I can see it as a high-concept experiment, but it’s still an experiment where the resulting mixture doesn’t come out right.
I also agree that it’s PTA’s most focused film. Like I said, that felt like another experiment to me.
All this said, as a notable step on the walkway towards THERE WILL BE BLOOD, I’m willing to forgive the movie anything. The truth is I really admire this movie…I just don’t really like it.
January 14th, 2008 at 1:31 am
You’re not alone in that Travis. I was actually surprised to hear some praise for the coming from a couple of people (Matthew Zoller Seitz and Stu Van Arsdale) who made it pretty clear they weren’t huge fans of the man, though they both liked TWBB.
I’d always felt off in the wilderness in liking PDL.