***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffmann, and Luis Guzman
Directed & written by Paul Thomas Anderson
2002 R
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2002
I always liked Adam Sandler on “Saturday Night Live” and, in short spurts, I even enjoy the adolescent vulgarity of his comedy albums. I have fond memories of listening to him shriek “I’m comin’ outta da booth!” on his album “They’re All Gonna Laugh At You.” His basic persona in his comedy sketches and films remains the same, in much the same way that Woody Allen plays the same insecure, leftist intellectual from movie to movie. Sandler’s avatar has always been a soft-spoken but socially maladjusted nice guy who flies into rages, sometimes inexplicably, but sometimes at things the rest of us would like to fly into rages about. There’s real pathos to this persona, but so far all of Sandler’s movies, like “The Waterboy” and “Billy Madison,” have been sloppily-directed junk comedies driven by recycled formulae to save the orphanage, the company, the farm, grandma’s house, or whatever. Worse yet, Sandler has always made an enormous artistic cop-out in all of them by treating his persona like a joke; art is a revelation of some secret need in the artist, and despite the persona’s obvious importance to Sandler, he keeps treating it sarcastically, ironically. This isn’t for real, he seems to be saying. I’m just joking around.
Now along comes Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love,” which is a movie I’ve been waiting for without even knowing it. Sandler is still playing more-or-less the same guy he always plays, but now the persona is treated sincerely, and that makes all the difference in the world. He’s lonely, inarticulate, quiet, but basically a nice man, with a deep-seeded need to be understood and appreciated, a need that comes out the only way he knows how: in spurts of unprovoked rage. “Punch-Drunk Love” also liberates Sandler from the worthless Screenwriting 101 contrivances of his previous films, instead giving his character the freedom to go where he might really go instead of simply marching from sketch to sketch toward a manipulative, meaningless climax.
But I’ve only said what “Punch-Drunk Love” isn’t, not what it is. What it is is hard to describe, and The Wife and I are racking our collective brain to think of how to summarize it. There’s a nice guy who doesn’t get along well with the world and has his personal demon. He meets a nice girl but his demon keeps them from getting together, and he is able, with the help of her love, to reconcile himself with it. But he must hit rock bottom first, his demon must grow to its largest before he is finally willing to confront it, and “Punch-Drunk Love” is his coming to terms with what’s inside him.
The nice guy is Barry (Adam Sandler), and it is crucial to “PDL” that we like his essence, even if he is rough around the edges. It’s human nature to like what is downtrodden and despondent, and Barry is nothing if not likable in his strange way. Financially he is a success—he owns a small business, distributing novelty plungers to hardware stores and hotels—but his demon is his inability to express himself, except in pleasant, uncertain banalities, or in spurts of furniture-breaking rage. Where his anger comes from is hard to pinpoint, and he is teased and pecked at by seven sisters who genuinely care for him but don’t understand him. He doesn’t know how to tell them to stop and we can feel an explosion building up inside him, until, at one of their birthday parties, he finds himself kicking out three floor-to-ceiling windows. After ruining his sisters’ party, Barry calls a phone-sex company out of loneliness and finds himself talking to the tele-slut about his business portfolio and hopes to diversify.
The love of an honest woman comes from gentle, big-eyed Emily Watson, who is herself a little offbeat and perfectly happy that he’s so silent. Their romance is so tender in its bizarre way, even when their sweet nothings include the desire to smash the other’s face in with a sledgehammer. In lieu of anything else to talk about on a date, Barry tells her about a radio personality to whom he likes to listen, and ends by saying “I always laugh at him, even when there’s no one else around.” Barry hits rock bottom when he is targeted for extortion by the phone-sex company. Faced by thugs who are almost maniacal in their greed for his $750, he finally learns that his banal politeness and reclusiveness won’t solve anything. It doesn’t matter whether or not Barry succeeds in his crusade against the perverts, all that matters is that he learns to express his anger in, if not healthy ways, than in ways less unhealthy than bottling it up. In the leader of the perverts (Philip Seymour Hoffmann) Barry finds an appropriate nemesis for all his anger, which he learns in this instance is righteous indignation. He learns that sometimes it’s appropriate to be angry, to yell at his sisters, and to not be ashamed of what he wants. (He learns the lesson too well and finds himself in a murderous rage toward his sister on the phone, but whatever.)