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Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
I went to this movie with a lack of enthusiasm. Previous efforts by writer/director P.T. Anderson have failed to find a warm spot in my heart. Boogie Nights struck me as a series of fairly obvious observations on the porn industry. Magnolia was pointless and egregiously self-indulgent. I was surrounded by people who sang the praises of these films. So I went to this film on something of a mission. Anderson was winning ill deserved praise and I anted to put a stop to it. Certainly this film was a worthy target of my scorn. Thanks to an award winning appearance at the Cannes Film Festival, PDL was already whipping critics into a fervor. Worse, the film starred Adam Sandler, who brought us such wretched excuses for film like Billy Madison and Mr. Deeds. Here was a film I could savage and reverse this heinous trend.
Then I saw the film.
It's a shame when perfectly good plans smack hard into reality.
Punch-Drunk Love as it turns out, is a pretty good film. Adam Sandler, it turns out, can actually act and act well. This is why I go see a film before reviewing it. It seems I needed a reminder of that.
This is one of the oddest, most original and funny of romantic comedies. It follows no rules of the genre and genuinely tries to do something new. Sandler stars as Barry Egan. This another lovable loser role for Sandler, but the difference is that this is a real character and not a cartoon. Barry struggles to find his place in the world, most likely as a result of the incessant and vicious abuse by his sisters, all seven of them. He runs his own business but beyond that we have to wonder just how tightly his lid is screwed on. When he gets enough of his sisters' abuse, he goes ballistic, breaking windows.
Now, Barry's reactions are realistic, but virtually nothing else about the film is. This story and all the events are just flat out loopy. We open up to watch a tiny piano dumped on the side of the road for no apparent reason. Then there is a bizarre and fairly illogical battle between Barry and the operator of a phone sex company. And then there is the girl who falls for Barry. I don't see what she sees in him, other than a shared passion for really bad pillow talk. Any one of these things could cripple another movie but Anderson just keeps piling them on until the film has a fairly surreal quality and you start laughing just because you don't know what to expect anymore. Did I mention the scheme to earn millions of frequent flyer miles through the purchase of pudding? What about the blue suit? See? You don't know where this stuff is coming from or going to and that makes the whole thing great fun to watch unfold.
Sandler is great to watch because he gives a surprisingly layered performance. Barry is the kind of guy who just wants to please. He's afraid to offend people because he needs desperately to be liked. His sisters have clearly shattered his confidence, sentencing him to a rather lonely existence. Sandler lets us see a violent rage hiding just under the surface of that nice guy exterior. You can see it boiling up every time he struggles to deal with a situation, occasionally leading him to recklessly destroy something.
I also greatly appreciated this film's brevity. It clocks in around an hour and a half in length, never over staying its welcome. This comes in stark contrast to Magnolia in which Anderson attempts to see if it's possible to make absolutely no cuts in the editing process. Hopefully he got that out of his system. Anyway, I can say that the next P.T. Anderson won't have me frothing at the mouth to put him down. I'm officially resetting my attitude on him to neutral.
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