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
