| PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE |
 2002 - USA / Japan
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson - Reviewed by Linda
Adam Sandler never worked for me on Saturday Night Live (that Opera Man especially grated on my last nerve... was that supposed to be funny?), and I've managed to never see an "Adam Sandler Movie" before. But I found him to be goofily charming as small businessman Barry Egan, and even a little sad. Barry Egan is a guy in a bright blue suit that runs a small warehousey business selling novelty toilet plungers (there's a market for everything, I suppose!). He buys literally tons of pudding to reap free promotional air miles. He rescues a harmonium off the street and wistfully plays its mooing accordion-like groans in his office. He calls a phone sex line one night when he is lonely. He meets a sweet and pretty woman Lena (Emily Watson) one day who is actually interested in him. But Barry's sweet, stammering, and kind of passive demeanor sometimes suddenly sparks into fits of rage and violence. See, Barry grew up with seven dominating sisters who care for him, but have always pushed him around (as only siblings can do). Maybe it's all the teasing he's endured all his life, or maybe it is his general low self-esteem, but Barry has this nervous energy that sometimes explodes into bursts of rage. When he finds out that he is being blackmailed by the phone-sex line's pimpy owner (Philip Seymour Hoffman) just when he is finally starting a sweet romance with Lena, well... you don't want to cross Barry's path when he's pissed. With PT Anderson's direction style—vast shots of empty suburban streets, unexplained car crashes, the screen becoming awash in colors—Punch-Drunk Love is not a typical comedy. It is quirky and a little bit off in its humor. Much of it is very funny. Much of it is odd. And the soundtrack is often punctuated by a kind of sparse industrial clanging and grating sampling "music" that I felt didn't particularly add anything to the story (except make you occasionally cover your ears and wince). Overall, at a brisk 90-some minutes, Punch-Drunk Love is also enjoyable and lightweight. Not necessarily in a bad way, but in a forget-the-film-by-the-end-of-the-evening way. Anderson and Sandler were present at the preview screening I attended, and Anderson pointed out that since people laughed, the movie was a comedy. If people didn't laugh, it would have been a drama. Because of the underlying sadness, loneliness, and frustration of Barry, I can see where the line between comedy and drama is very thin. It was enlighting to see that maybe Adam Sandler isn't so obnoxious after all. |
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There will be a contingent of people rushing to see Punch-Drunk Love because of the Adam Sandler factor (the astonishing opening-weekend box office of such films as The Waterboy can attest to that). But the revelation of Punch-Drunk Love is that not an Adam Sandler Movie, but is clearly a PT Anderson film (Magnolia, Boogie Nights) that just happens to star Adam Sandler.
