Adam Sandler Sobers Up; Leads Punch-Drunk
By Kate Brokaw
A&F Staff Writer

A strange little piano– actually a wheezing harmonium– falls from the back of a taxi cab in the opening moments of Punch-Drunk Love, the oddly magical new film by Paul Thomas Anderson. It’s not like the frogs that Anderson made rain from the sky three years ago in Magnolia, his sprawling epic of dysfunction and biblical imagery, but it’s just one of the surreal moments that permeate this odd, delicate harmonium of a film. Centered by a surprisingly serious performance by Adam Sandler, Punch-Drunk Love pushes all the boundaries of Hollywood genre to create a weird, wonderful romantic tale.

Sandler’s Barry Egan is a sad, beleaguered small-business owner whose life is almost completely defined by his loneliness and anonymity. His seven overbearing sisters still like to call him “gay boy,” and his life has become so routine that he obsesses over his discovery of a loophole in a frequent flyer promotion with a pudding company. “It’s a marketing mistake, but I’m taking advantage of it,” he confides. But when that piano interrupts the early morning silence of his life, along with the sudden appearance of a lovely Englishwoman named Lena (Emily Watson), Barry’s emotionally stunted life begins to take peculiar new turns.

Anderson seems punch-drunk with the artistic possibilities of the film, and a spectacular visual sense is maintained throughout Punch-Drunk Love. A frozen food aisle becomes an astonishingly well composed cinematic shot. Scenes fade into colorful abstract patterns that resemble the interior liner notes to Beck’s new album Sea Change (both were created by artist Jeremy Blake).

Robert Elswit’s widescreen camerawork is brisk and controlled, always poetic rather than self-conscious. Tense scenes are filled with constant overlapping sound textures and dialogue, and Jon Brion’s jangling, clashing music score mixes chaos with silence and plays both against slow motion, slow dissolves and changing lighting effects.

In lesser hands all this would be a recipe for disaster, but Anderson’s mastery of the medium just becomes more intriguing and enchanting all the way through the journey.

These kinds of cinematic choices could have reduced the impact of the story, but instead they have just the opposite effect-they add to the strange, unpredictable narrative of the film. This is a much lighter picture on its feet than either Magnolia or Boogie Nights with all their technical brilliance. At 89 minutes– less than half the length of Magnolia– Punch-Drunk Love still makes time for a dark sub-plot involving a phone-sex pimp (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his corrupt setup, all out to get the increasingly desperate Sandler.

And what a brilliant casting choice Anderson has made with his leading man. Sandler’s all seriousness here: goofy voices and gross-out innuendoes have been replaced by a real actorly directness that can whip back and forth from violent outbursts to moments of strikingly tender intimacy. “I don’t like myself sometimes,” he admits at one point, and starts to cry. Coming almost immediately after a vicious breakdown, it’s an incredibly vulnerable moment, and just a small piece of his astonishingly complex performance.

This is the Hollywood romance side of “Punch-Drunk Love,” and Anderson even includes a dreamy midsection to the film in which Barry follows Lena to Hawaii, underscored by a wistful ballad. And because of this underlying nature, it doesn’t matter as much that Hoffman’s villain is overdrawn or that Lena is somewhat underdrawn; the characters are important more for what they represent.

Buoyed by his love for Lena, Barry proclaims his newly found strength and confidence near the end of the film: “I have a love in my life and it makes me stronger than anything you can imagine.” Engraved on his bloodied knuckles we see the word “love,” another sign that Anderson is willing to let Lena be the final savior of this eccentric and erratic character. Just as Barry gains infinite strength by fighting (literally) through the barriers obstructing his new relationship, the go-for-broke, “punch-drunk” nature of the film itself is the only way it can truly embody all of the implications of love.