"There's no reason for you to treat me this way. You’re killing me. You're killing me with the way you are towards me! All I want is the fucking number and that should be goddamn good enough for you! Now give me the fucking number! You fucking hear me? I'm sick of this fucking shit! Stop treating me this way and give me the fucking number! I'll fucking kill you!"
Adam Sandler. Yelling. In a phone booth. In Hawaiii. In a blue suit. Threatening death upon his sister. It makes my heart soar. How can this be? Well, to be quite simple and downright corny about it -- because it's love. Love, American-Paul-Thomas-Anderson-style. The director's exalting, superb, poetic Punch-Drunk Love remains one of the most romantic movies of the last near ten years.
And yet, many don't agree. I've written about this movie here before, but since it's Valentine's Day, a day I don't care for (raw, real emotions are not what you see when going out on this day, unless you count the raw, real strain couples usually express while attempting, or, worse, being forced to ignite "romance"), I wanted to return to the film. Since I was baffled by the picture’s lukewarm to mixed reception upon release (in 2002), I wonder if it remains misunderstood to this day. I know that even many Anderson lovers scratched their heads over the movie’s lack of epic heft, extra multiple storylines and large scale speeches. (Many did the same with There Will Be Blood, another movie that features a strong central performance and person who seems to polarize people -- the brilliant Daniel Day Lewis). And then there was that Adam Sandler bias -- the knee jerk and unfair question of, why? Why, Happy Gilmore? (And to clarify, I like Happy Gilmore).
And I don’t just like Punch-Drunk Love, I love Punch-Drunk Love. I love it with an odd fear, and with my entire body, like how I feel when an anxiety attack has passed and my brain is still tripping from the surge of adrenaline -- when birds and trees and cab drivers suddenly gain a glowing, but warped beauty. An extraordinary, unique picture that manages to simultaneously subvert and showcase the Sandler persona beautifully, while maintaining Anderson’s singular éclat as a filmmaker. Anderson’s masterpiece, There Will Be Blood has proven the director can handle multiple genres, but he had revealed his versatility earlier with Punch-Drunk. No long Anderson, extraordinary monologues, no expertly interwoven subplots, no drugs, Punch-Drunk Love was a film we'd not only never seen Anderson create, it was (and still is) a movie we’d never seen anywhere. And no matter how you feel about Sandler, he leaves a lasting impression as lonely, alienated Barry Egan, the Californian businessman and put-upon brother who falls for the ever-patient Emily Watson.
To explain the off-kilter, dissonant power of Punch-Drunk Love (aided by Jon Brion’s compelling, lovely, yet anxiety ridden score) is nearly impossible: So alien yet incredibly human is the movie, it frequently puts the viewer right into the uncomfortable, anxious mind of Barry -- an unsettling, but to many, familiar place to be. We have no idea what will happen next (but with delight, and sometimes heartbreak). Sandler, who had displayed talent before this, has never been so fantastically abstract, utilizing his scared-yet-angry-but-violent-little-boy persona with a sublime darkness. This may sound ridiculous to some but Anderson's influence on Sandler is somewhat akin to Alfred Hitchcock's use of Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo (who had certainly played darker characters before Vertigo) -- pulling the dusky and misunderstood out of a popular American movie star and layering him with wounded depth. He did the same with Tom Cruise's transcendent performance in Magnolia ("I will drop kick those fucking dogs" is almost a Barry Egan moment).
Sandler’s verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown, yet deeply romantic Barry is so powerfully beguiling that when Anderson films his journey to Hawaii, it's a moment that's so overwhelmingly romantic, so remarkably special, it both swoons with gorgeousness and rattles your nerves -- all those deep seated raw emotions bubbling to the surface. Tuned to Shelley Duvall singing Harry Nilsson's enchanting and offbeat "He Needs Me" from Robert Altman's great, underrated Popeye (so spot on, bullseye perfect), Barry moves from work to airport to cab to phone booth, where he finally takes a stand against his sister (“You’re killing me. You're killing me with the way you are towards me. All I want is the fucking number and that should be goddamn good enough for you!"), and then reaches Lena. In a beautiful touch, when she answers, the payphone lights up to her voice. A musical sequence that plays like Anderson’s twisted version of the Arthur Freed unit (Barry’s Technicolor blue suit alone) it’s a masterful ode to vulnerability, fear and power, and something that seems impossible to replicate -- stamped with all that live wire, off the cliff Anderson energy and influence.
This might be why some respond so strongly to the picture, or just cannot wrap their heart or mind around the thing. I'm not certain. There are those who don't understand a woman loving her man so much that she wants to "chew" his eyeballs, and there are those who do. Love can make you do and say crazy things -- and can become so overwhelming that when it enters the realms of violent thought -- positive or negative -- it isn’t so strange, to you. Anderson clearly digs this dynamic so, if letting your guard down leads to deception, you might kill that impostor in a rage a la There Will Be Blood’s Daniel Plainview, who dumps his faux brother into a shallow grave and shovels dirt over his dead body (a scene I completely comprehend). And if finally sleeping with your beloved makes you realize the strength of your love so much, you can easily confess: “I'm lookin' at your face and I just wanna smash it. I just wanna fuckin' smash it with a sledgehammer and squeeze it. You're so pretty.” Well, that’s just bloody fucking brilliant beautiful.
LOVE this movie so much.
Posted by: COOP | February 13, 2011 at 10:14 PM
It's been ages since I've seen this film. I was twenty or twenty-one when it came out and probably a world away from truly understanding it, but I admired it for the way it took Adam Sandler's man child fits of rage and crafted a real, damaged, vulnerable person around it. This review really makes me want to see it again.
That being said, I have a tendency to occasionally posit the question of what in any actor's filmography is their "Unforgiven?"
At the time I had suggested that "Funny People" was Adam Sandler's. It was partly because it is more a reflection of who he is to popular culture than, perhaps, "Punch Drunk Love" is but I suspect when you start to look at how deep the wounds and the regrets of a hard lived life go you probably arrive at the conclusion my friend did, it was "Punch Drunk Love."
I guess there's no point in asking which side of the line you fall on, but I thought I'd share.
Posted by: brandon curtis | February 13, 2011 at 11:11 PM
Anderson's best film - better than "There Will Be Blood." Another unforgettable scene is visiting his sisters then blowing the windows out. "I don't like myself," Sandler says. We do.
Posted by: Aaron | February 18, 2011 at 10:05 AM
I was watching this again recently and realized that it is both an anti-romantic comedy and an especially romantic anti-romantic comedy. The easiest thing to notice is that the female makes all of the initial moves, even though she's not the main character, which already puts it in opposition to a conservative estimate of 99.9% of them. For evidence: She shows up to meet him without being introduced, she asks him if he wants to have dinner with her, and she calls him before he leaves her building telling her she wanted to kiss him. Having a troubled and violent leading man doesn't make it any more conventional, and his later obsessiveness could certainly have sucked the romance out of the story quite quickly and turned it a bit frightening had she not made the first moves. Of course, it's this imbalance which allows for his ultra-romantic gestures, flying to Hawaii on a whim and snapping on the thugs and driving out to Utah and saying crazy things that somehow make total sense like, "I have a love in my life. It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine." That all of these details are isolated and opposed to conventional elements mixes in well with the expected elements - the romantic kiss at the door and the hands joining as they walk down the hallway and the other scenes I'm forgetting now... the important point: it is a very self-aware romantic comedy, because as opposed as its central elements are it is still both romantic and comedy, so there's no escaping its categorization. I think it's brilliant, though, how it takes the conventional elements which seem so essential to create a pair of likable characters that can be easily empathized with and throws them out the window to make something even more romantic, funnier due to their disconnects, and yet totally believable because they're not caricatures, and may in fact have some personal problems they need to work out. But even then - they're going to work them out together, which makes it more romantic than the conventions ever could. Which is to say - Anderson took the elements which were ineffectual and flaccid, made them more troubling and bizarre, and somehow perfected the genre. Brilliant! I fuckin' love your enthusiasm for the film, I just wanna smash it with a sledgehammer and squeeze it.
Posted by: JeanRZEJ | February 25, 2011 at 05:42 PM