'Punch-Drunk'? Love It!
I URGE you to see "Punch-Drunk Love" for so many reasons.
At the very least, this is the antidote to all those awful Adam Sandler movies you've sat through before. You can almost forgive him. None of his regular audiences will like this movie. How great is that?
In this movie, you'll see Sandler like you've never seen him. He doesn't metamorphose into Kevin Spacey before your eyes. But he gives – and this is easy to declare, and I don't care if they quote me – the performance of his life.
But there are other reasons, far more interesting than Sandler's redemption. Most significantly, the movie's by Paul Thomas Anderson, who made the inspired "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia."
"Punch-Drunk" shows Anderson, too, as you've never seen him. (Along with M. Night Shyamalan, he continues to be this country's most inventive, vital and sensitive mainstream filmmaker.) Even though "Punch-Drunk" doesn't come at you with the same dizzying, virtuoso technique of "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia," it's a movie of extraordinary subtlety, power and even hokey romanticism. (Did I just lose 40,000 readers?)
But it's not all sweetness. Far from it. You get that message right away as the odd Barry Egan (Sandler) cools his heels on the street outside his office. Around him is a landscape of quintessentially American barrenness: an industrial park in California.
Suddenly, he witnesses a momentarily shocking incident (I refuse to give it away) that not only sets up the story, it's a harbinger of future disturbances. Those disturbances are internal. They are the odd rhythms inside Barry's psychic makeup.
Luckily, movies don't have to provide cut-and-dried medical buzz terms for what goes on in Barry's head. Clearly the lad has issues. But his soul is unequivocally pure. That's the mark of beauty here. It's the distinguishing characteristic that will mark him for good things – this despite the excruciating trials he'll soon endure.
We see one contributing factor to Barry's seismic personality when he goes home to a party with his seven (a mythic number there) sisters. All taunt him as they always used to; they call him "gay boy." The label seems not to faze him. Ah, but the scene is young. And again, let me retreat from further explication.
The breakthrough part of the story is this: Barry meets Lena (Emily Watson) whom one of Barry's sisters is setting up for him. But before Barry can come close to any kind of union with Lena, there are hurdles.
The first and biggest is himself. Although he's a gentle soul on the surface, he's given to violent outbursts. No table, chair or wall is safe in his vicinity. On a quieter plane, he has become obsessed with buying mountains and mountains of tinned pudding so he can qualify for a frequent-flier prize. Is Barry ready for romantic prime time? It's not clear that he is.
As if inner demons weren't enough, Barry commits the sin of making a credit-card sex call one evening. Not since the movies of Alfred Hitchcock has a peccadillo been so resoundingly punished.
The woman with the soothing voice, who calls herself Georgia, turns out to be a harridan of biblical import. Barry tumbles into a nightmarish subworld that doesn't countenance escape. It takes everything he's got – and doesn't even realize he's got – to fight and claw his way out.
"Punch-Drunk Love," as with Anderson's other films, eventually comes down to love. Modern life is a mental prison, not only for the external, often arbitrary hardships but the inter and inner hells: the tortured relationships with family, and the psychological damage from a traumatic past or simple medical conditions. Through this miasma of pain and suffering, love may not flicker more strongly than a dim lamp. But it's the only beacon to consider. Can Barry find his? Thanks to Anderson's assured picture, a symphony of cinematic textures, that disarmingly simple question becomes incredibly compelling.
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