Romance Season: Punch Drunk Love (Dir Paul Thomas Anderson, 1h37m, 2002)

Adam Sandler. At once the punchline of every joke about minimum-effort "comedy" cinema, from the execrable video-game-aping Pixels and equally terrible dual role comedy Jack and Jill to his clunking attempt to make the quintessential animated Hanukkah film in Eight Crazy Nights, Sandler is also capable of surprising us. Whilst Uncut Gems (2019) may be the most recent film in which Sandler once again returns, like a veritable boomerang of cinema, to form, his career is dotted with performances that remind us that the low-energy star of Happy Madison Productions is capable of solid, and occasionally sublime performances. Happy Gilmore and the three Hotel Transylvania films may play best to his comedic chops, but the affecting Reign Over Me and Funny People prove that he is capable of sterling dramatic performances.

Enter Paul Thomas Anderson. Whilst he is no stranger to making the most of even fairly limited actors-after all, we have him to thank for Mark Wahlberg having a career outside extremely white hip-hop, Punch Drunk Love is something of an outlier for his filmography, sandwiched between the acclaimed Magnolia (1999), and the (if possible) even more acclaimed There Will Be Blood (2007). It only further feels like an outlier, compared to the relatively grounded and dramatic sensibilities of the rest of his filmography, in Punch Drunk Love's Jacques Tati-esque, and deliberately comedic exploits of Barry Egan (Sandler), a rage filled, socially anxious businessman who strikes up an off-beat relationship with Lena (Emily Watson), in what is unquestionably Sandler's best film, and perhaps Anderson's most mainstream picture to date.

The film begins, in an almost dreamlike state, with Egan working in the makeshift office in a lock-up, a typically Andersonic slow pullback slowly revealling the bizarre location our hero, arguing on the telephone with the company that essentially set up the film's secondary plot, that of Egan finding a loophole in a Healthy Foods promotion to generate colossal amounts of frequent flier miles from the film's memetic and oft-referred to pudding. The call ends, and he gets up from his chair, and rather than cutting to the outside of the lockup, the camera pans, into darkness, as Egan steps out into the dawn, coffee cup in hand, shot in one graceful slow pan out into the road to show the dawn.

Here, in quick succession, the film sets up three key motifs; the inexplicable vehicle flip preludes the film's off-kilter comedy and violence, the arrival of the harmonium, later to become quasi-totemic to represent Barry and Lena's relationship is equally strange, his rescue of it a panicked snap decision. Together with this we get the videoart of American Jeremy Blake, strange abstract moments that largely arrive to punctuate the movement of our heroes across the United States, but far from being vaguely pretty visual interludes, they perfectly portray, in a way that Barry seems entirely unable to articulate, his whirling emotions, of love, and anger, and sadness.

When it finally comes, at the end of this opening sequence, this dawning of the day before his colleagues arrive, Lena's appearance itself is a wonderfully strange moment, this meeting of equally odd figures, their dialogue given a nervous, unsure quality that effortlessly sets up the awkwardness and, soon after, the repressed anger of Barry's life, as well as the oddness of Lena (Emily Watson. As his colleagues arrive, and we see the mask of the entrepreneur descend, he is assailed by phone calls that drag him this way and that, before arriving at a birthday party for one of his seven sisters, where after being bullied and ridiculed, we see the first explosion of violence. It is, as Anderson tends to depict violence, both shocking and stunningly matter-of-fact in its execution as Barry smashes the patio windows in one unbroken take.

Punch Drunk Love is a film, for all its romantic overtones, about masculinity-for all his comic chops, Sandler is at his best, as his neurotic Jewish diamond dealer anti-hero in Uncut Gems proved, when he leans into the darkness, the rage of being the little man. Barry is a perfect prototype of this; after the party and his nigh-breakdown in front of his sister's husband, we see him turn to a phone sex hotline that eventually turn adversarial, but far from this being alluring, in an series of uncomfortable slow pans, we see the nervous energy, the inability to keep still, the quasi-neurotic quality of Barry. This is reflected perfectly in Jon Brion's nervous, twitchy score, that practically acts as a musical mood ring for Barry. This violence, this volcanic temper, only grows once this relationship goes south and she begins to first request, and then blackmail him for money, leading to a quartet of brothers, straight out of the Coen Brothers' early oeuvre, inflicting a brutal beating upon him. 

 

From here, as Lena departs for Hawaii, and the pudding scheme hits an unexpected snag, leading to another blazing outburst from Barry, in which he destroys his office, aside from the harmonium that he has previously repaired and occasionally played, and set off for Hawaii himself, eventually catching up with Lena, and making his romantic intentions, and his now-decided usage for the colossal number of frequent flyer miles, clear, and the scenes that follow are as tender, as perfectly romantic, despite our protagonists, as any romantic comedy for the last twenty five years.

Their romance now kindled, their love is promptly tested by a return of the quartet of brothers, who Barry, in his final, and perhaps most cathartic explosion of rage, fends off, before abandoning Lena at the hospital to settle a score with the all-too brief appearance of the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a tough-guy manager of the sex hotline, whose day job as a mattress showroom proprietor is rudely interrupted by the arrival of Barry via another Blake art-piece interlude who proceeds to intimidate . He returns, makes amends with Lena, with harmonium in tow, and the film ends with Barry playing the instrument to Lena.

That Sandler walks this perfect line between tragic clown, comic fool and romantic lead is nothing short of superb, and that Sandler and Anderson are able to seemingly, at will, change between tones in mid-scene. We see Barry swapping between a man driven by rage and male shortcomings, the outburst in the bathroom mid-date with Lena, where he practically destroys everything in sight gives way to an almost slapstick sensibility as Barry tries to explain away his injured hand to an understandably furious manager, which itself gives way to perhaps the most tender moment of the entire film, a moment that calls beautifully to mind silent cinema and the work of Tati, as, ebullient, he races back through the labyrinth of corridors to kiss Lena.

Lena, for her part is far from a mere bystander in her romance; Watson lends a wonderfully off-beat sensibility to her character, a woman who not only tolerates Barry's outbursts, his strange compulsions, seems intrigued by his oft-mentioned pudding scheme, but has quirks of her own. She, after all, not only approaches Barry first, but deceptively, later admitting that she saw him in a picture belonging to his sister. There is, undeniably, chemistry, not merely of a woman taking pity on this world-battered angry middle aged man, but of two people, despite, or perhaps because of, their flaws, falling in love with each other.

This is not to say that the film hand-waves away all of Barry's shortcomings-for all his gentleness with both Lena and the instrument that practically stands as shorthand for their relationship, he is a volatile man, his anger often getting the better of him, exploding into violence without warning several times in the film. Barry Egin is the quintessential disaffected white man, belittled by family, sexually frustrated, and unhappy; that he is, despite this, our hero, the man whose budding romance, despite all his pratfalls and setbacks, is down to both Sandler's skill as an actor, and Anderson's as a director. Despite the small little life of pudding and novelty plungers and social awkwardness, we want Barry to succeed, and when he does, it's as affecting, as warm a scene as possible.

Punch Drunk Love fell just $300,000 short of making its budget back, and though it sits a little awkwardly between its iconic siblings that practically made and re-made Anderson's career, it belongs,a small little artistically shot and edited romantic comedy between cinematic heavyweights. It belongs. Punch Drunk Love stands as the high-tide mark for one of America's most divisive actors, in a film that lands perfectly between the clownish lows and the uncomfortable, profound highs of Adam Sandler's career, playing perfectly to both of these strengths.

Rating: Highly Recommended