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Punch-Drunk Love

By Paul Byrnes
April 5 2003

Desperate but not dateless: Emily Watson and Adam Sandler.

The king of dopey losers is finally given some real emotions to juggle.

Punch-Drunk Love
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Rated M
Cinemas everywhere

Movie stars, like Ford cars, are an American invention, both built on the idea of replication and sameness. Each star is like a different model - and there is enormous variation between models - but once a model is made it's hard to change.

Stars aren't encouraged to vary their roles, and this is doubly true of comedians. The ability to make people laugh is something of a life sentence as well as a gift.

That's why the pairing of Adam Sandler with writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson is beyond surprising. This is like seeing Woody Allen in a golfing comedy. Sandler is the king of dopey losers. He has become a huge star playing a string of stupid white males who are shiftless, shambolic or slightly retarded (Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, The Waterboy, Big Daddy).

Forrest Gump had more of a clue than most of these guys - although each Sandler goof also has some kind of hidden talent. Paul Thomas Anderson, by contrast, is Hollywood's newest auteur of angst.

Magnolia, his third feature after Hard Eight and Boogie Nights, was three hours long and so full of pain that it made Chekhov look funny. It felt like a film from a different decade - maybe the early 1970s, before the studios discovered blockbusters. It was so extreme - Julianne Moore spent the whole movie in tears or shrieking, and then there was the astounding thing with the frogs, one of the most daring and surreal scenes in any modern American film. Even Boogie Nights, while ostensibly a comedy, was full of pain and humiliation.

That hasn't disappeared from Punch-Drunk Love, but it is a much sunnier film for Anderson, even as it's a darker one for Sandler. The combination works to change each one's reputation in the way that it did for Astaire and Rogers (to whom it's partially a tribute, albeit an offbeat one). The old saying is that she gave him sex appeal and he gave her class.

Sandler gives Anderson his gift for effortless comedy and Anderson gives Sandler some real emotions to play, in a movie that's partly conceived as a modern Jacques Tati film. It will surprise those who thought Sandler was just a goofball, and disappoint some for whom fart jokes are a sign of a movie's quality.

What Punch-Drunk Love offers instead is a constant and wonderful unpredictability by combining an understated sweet romance with the threat of accident or violence. It's the collision of an ideal world and a less than ideal one.

That's the idea in the title and the reason the first scene ends with two exceptionally weird events. The first I won't describe, but the second occurs straight after, as Sandler stands gaping like a fish at what he has just seen. It's early morning in a deserted industrial street in the San Fernando Valley and he is wearing a blue suit, looking like it's a new thing (which it is).

He stands on the driveway to the warehouse where he runs a novelty goods business when a courier van roars up and drops a small piano on the pavement, then roars away. He retreats quickly into the warehouse, leaving the harmonium in the driveway. It's obvious this guy has problems and when we meet his sisters, all seven of them, we understand why.

There are a few constants in Sandler's characters and one is a problem with controlling anger. Happy Gilmore thought golf was a contact sport; Bobby Boucher became a football star in The Waterboy because he could tackle like a missile, but only when angry. In Punch-Drunk Love, Barry Egan (Sandler) has a pathological timidity and an uncontrollable temper.

His sisters won't let him alone to be the scared, weird little guy he is, so when they push him too far, which is whenever they talk to him, he feels like exploding. They remind him of things he has done, which humiliates him all over again, making it likely he will do them again. They often involve broken glass.

In a typical Adam Sandler movie these would become comic highlights of the film, but the effect is more muted here because Barry is such a lonely and harried man. Sandler can't help but make him funny, but in sad ways.

When one of the seven witches brings a girlfriend (Emily Watson) to meet him at the warehouse, his efforts to duck for cover are excruciating but poignant. Barry cannot bear to be in the spotlight, so this new woman, Lena Leonard, is tantalising and terrifying for him. They're both shy, but she's not in his league. When she asks him to have dinner, he looks like he's going to faint.

The similarity between Sandler and the bumbling Jerry Lewis is obvious, but Sandler makes his bumblers more real. He's a minimalist, where Lewis was a maximalist. Lewis barely shut up, but Sandler barely speaks. The combination with Watson, who has a bright, dreamy Englishness and a lot more verbal speed, is a clever one. She says whatever she's thinking; he's speechless.

Anderson grew up with seven siblings and even looks a little like Adam Sandler. In interviews he can appear uncomfortable, as if he's barely controlling a desire to run away. His answers are disarmingly frank, but strained.

The flashes of intensity and barely concealed anger make clear where Barry Egan came from, but the movie's revelation is that Anderson offers us a remedy as well as a problem. Everyone in Magnolia was searching for something, too, and death seemed to be the only solution. In Punch-Drunk Love, Barry finds his first love and it gives him strength he never knew he had. Anderson offers us the possibility of life, which is a street he's never ventured up before.




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