Adam Sandler proved what a terrific actor he is with the right material when he played Barry Egan in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love.” Barry’s lonely – and angry – and feels smothered by his seven sisters. When you first meet him, he comes across like a wounded animal. Because of his loneliness, Barry makes a call to a sex operator and gives her all his personal information which will come back to haunt him. In the meantime, a harmonium (a small piano) mysteriously appears at his business’ door – and Lena – a lovely woman – also shows up for she’s fallen for him from seeing him in a photo. And that’s the plot of this wondrous and quirky romantic comedy directed by master director Paul Thomas Anderson – which at first seems slight compared to his other works (“There Will Be Blood,” “The Master,” “The Phantom Menace,” and “Boogie Nights”,’) – yet it’s my favorite of his movies. Could it be because it is the only of his complex oeuvre that ends optimistically? Yes, that’s it – and – also – that with the passage of time, this romance has remained so relevant. Barry seeks redemption and achieves it – and overcomes difficult obstacles which are mostly within himself. He achieves harmony and happiness – and I get great comfort reliving his resurgence.
In all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s canon, the central character is flawed and distressed – yet each one longs for connection. Anderson explores themes of isolation and disaffection. His movies have a very distinctive style- and he pushed that even further in 2002 with “Punch-Drunk Love.” There’s a bold usage of color in this film. Notice how Barry only uses the color blue in his clothing – and when love comes into his life in the form of Lena – she wears red. As you watch the film pay attention how Anderson uses those two colors. Anderson uses long takes and a heightened sense of reality. You almost feel like this small tender story of a man seeking connectivity could be an MGM musical. There’s a compelling battle of contrasts in this movie: between tender music (notice the lovely waltz that plays throughout) and harsh sound, between the chaos that surrounds Barry’s life – and the order that he longs for and needs, between darkness and bright light. The whole film is about opposite forces – and how accord is found in the balancing of them.
Adam Sandler is brilliant in this. It’s an emotional and physical performance. His Barry is an identifiable flawed human that we all have inside of us. Philip Seymour Hoffman has a small role yet is so memorable. Anderson and him worked in several movies together until his untimely death.
There are so many things I’d love to point out about the film yet I think it’s best if you discover them on your own. One thing I do want you look out for and you will gain a deeper understanding of the director’s vision. Watch out – halfway through the movie – when a frustrated Barry punches the map on the back of his office wall. He will place his hand on the harmonium. Notice his knuckles – and see what you can make out.
I tear up every time I hear Barry exclaim towards the end of the movie, “I have a love in my life, It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine.”
Go ahead and get drunk with “Love.”
Roger
Available to stream on Hulu, and to rent on Amazon Prime, iTunes, YouTube, Vudu and Google Play.
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman
95 minutes
There is a new Adam Sandler on view in ‘Punch-Drunk Love’—angry, sad, desperate. In voice and mannerisms he is the same childlike, love-starved Adam Sandler we’ve seen in a series of dim comedies, but this film, by seeing him in a new light, encourages us to look again at those films. Given a director and a screenplay that sees through the Sandler persona, that understands it as the disguise of a suffering outsider, Sandler reveals depths and tones we may have suspected but couldn’t bring into focus.”
-Roger Ebert, October 2002
Paul Thomas Anderson
Paul Thomas Anderson was born June 26, 1970 in Studio City, California. His father was a radio and television personality and voice actor and Anderson was interested in film from an early age. His first short film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993 which led to his enrollment in the Sundance Institute to begin working on his first feature film. Today, Anderson has directed 8 feature films and received 8 Academy Awards, and has collaborated multiple times with some of the most talented actors of our time, such as Daniel Day Lewis, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Joaquin Phoenix. Punch-Drunk Love is his fourth feature film.
“Somebody I’d really like to use is Adam Sandler. I just cry with laughter in his movies,” Anderson told The Guardian in an interview following the success of his 1999 film, Magnolia. At the time of the interview in the spring of 2000, Anderson was 30 years old. He’d made three movies, Hard Eight, Boogie Nights and Magnolia, each of which had been called a masterpiece. According to The Guardian, “He is routinely heralded as one of the great hopes of the American cinema, someone who got started early and who may have a lifetime of great movies inside him. The producers of his first movie, Hard Eight – which he still calls by its original title, Sidney – tried to be the boss of Paul, the king of Paul, but he fought to have his own version released and against all the odds, he won. ‘It f***ed up my entry into this whole world,’ he says. ‘Or maybe it actually helped, because it sure as hell put me on my guard.’ On Boogie Nights, Anderson was able to release the movie he’d envisaged, having developed the armour to keep the money men off his back. And with Magnolia, he got what every director twice his age still dreams of the moment his head hits the pillow: Final Cut.” (The Guardian). Three years later, Anderson offered to the world, what he called, “an art-house Adam Sandler movie.”
Revealing the Depths and Tones of Adam Sandler
Despite not quite making back its $25 million budget at the box office, Punch-Drunk Love heralded “a new Adam Sandler,” as Roger Ebert put it. In an interview with Ebert himself, Anderson elaborated on his desire to work with Sandler, stemming from a love of Sandler’s comedies. “I wanted to work with Sandler so much because if I’ve ever been kinda sad or down or whatever, I just wanna pop in an Adam Sandler movie… The last thing I would wanna do is watch ‘Magnolia,’ you know, or ‘Breaking the Waves.’ So I’m looking at Sandler and thinking God, I wanna get a piece of that. I wanna learn from that dude. What is it that’s so appealing about him to so many people? I think he’s this great communicator, you know… This sort of bashing from critics that he’s taken is just defeatist, really. His films are obviously good because they’re obviously communicating something to a lot of people and they’re making them laugh and that’s it, at the end of the day… He just appealed to me, point blank. He’s someone’s who’s taken such a bashing, but still, he was high on my list. In meeting him it all came clear to me. We have a really similar work ethic. Kind of obsessive and consumed by it.” (Rogerebert.com)
Harmonious Score
This “gloriously weird love story,” wouldn’t be the same without its singularly offbeat soundtrack, a continuation of the collaboration between Paul Thomas Anderson and composer, Jon Brion. “An multi-instrumentalist and record producer-cum-musical genius, Brion had worked on several of Anderson’s previous movies before being asked to score the writer-director’s story of a gentleman with anger issues (Sandler) who falls head over heels for a young woman (Emily Watson). The result is a distinctive blend of noise experimentation, a borrowed Harry Nilsson song from Popeye (“He Needs Me”), some primitive and atonal percussive interludes and several orchestral works that evoke the swooning symphonies of old Hollywood movies from the 1950s. The fact that all of these elements not only seem to work together but also mirror Punch-Drunk‘s pendulum-swings between TCM binge-watching and avant-garde art attest to Brion’s talent as a collaborator.” (Rolling Stone)