Flak Magazine: Review of Punch-Drunk Love, 10-24-02

Punch-Drunk Love is the fourth film from indie-fave director Paul Thomas Anderson, as well as the first serious role for teenage-boy-fave comedian Adam Sandler. For the past five years they have come to symbolize two opposing currents in American film: Anderson, the quirky, rabidly independent artiste; Sandler, the eternally adolescent master of bottom-barrel humor. Each claims legions of fans. So the question is: Whose movie is it?

Anderson's trademark is to bring well-known actors into difficult roles as a way of highlighting his eclectic and at times dark view of southern California, and his genius is to find within them something more than they'd previously displayed. Mark Wahlberg and Burt Reynolds as a budding porn star and his slimy mentor/director? Done, and with noted aplomb. Tom Cruise as a shallow infomercial host? Yep, and in a way that exposes a side of Cruise that Steven Spielberg and John Woo had either never seen or never cared to explore.

But Sandler — that's a tough one. Comedians are by necessity good actors; they have to hit every joke right, deploy just the right attitude to pull off a skit. But despite the dramatic successes of Tom Hanks and Jim Carrey, among others, there are many who just can't cut it. Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd have had limited successes, but they'll never pull in starring dramatic roles. And so while Sandler — whose streak of films running from Billy Madison to Mr. Deeds are slight turns on the same socially inept, erratic character — may be a comedic genius, Anderson took a big risk in casting him as the lead in Punch-Drunk Love.

The film is, after all, Anderson's baby. While Boogie Nights and Magnolia were sprawling, Russian-novel-esque social tableaus, Punch-Drunk Love is about one man, an eccentric, at times violent hotel supplier named Barry Egan and his discovery of love in the form of Lena Leonard (Emily Watson). The film has only a handful of characters, and many of the smaller roles, such as six of Barry's seven sisters, are played by non-actors. It's the sort of set-up one might expect from mid-career Francois Truffaut, splayed across the San Fernando Valley.

Because this is Anderson, the plot is deceptively complex — when Barry isn't being pursued by his harpie sisters, he's being extorted by a sex-line operator (Anderson regular Phillip Seymour Hoffman). He finds solace in little things, like a harmonium that mysteriously appears at the entrance to his warehouse one morning, or his plan to collect frequent-flyer miles off of pudding cups.

But like the way kudzu was introduced to the Georgia plains to control erosion only to have it take over every lamppost within 200 miles a few years later, Sandler dominates every crevice, every shot in Punch-Drunk Love. It's hard to imagine — here's a film written and director by someone notorious for his desire for fanatic control on the set, and it's literally transformed by Sandler to the point where sometimes the film feels like Anderson remaking Happy Gilmore.

This is not necessarily a good thing. Too many of the scenes flow like outtakes from previous Sandler efforts — Barry's erratic violence, which he learns to channel over the course of the film, is little more than a straight-faced version of The Waterboy. His jerky man-boy voice is taken directly from Billy Madison. But unlike that film's self-same protagonist, there's little to like about Egan. He's in love, and that's nice, but it's never clear why Lena falls for him, why she sits through his deranged rants when it's obvious he's neurons away from biting a passerby on the nose. In his comedies, Sandler's lunacy is endearing because craziness and exaggerated instability are part of the genre. And behind Billy Madison or Little Nicky, we know that Sandler is just goofing around, that it's all a big joke — these are ridiculous characters, and we should leave them as such and just have fun.

In drama, though, actors need to have something else, a cache of nonlunatic qualities they can draw on to keep the audience on their side when the laughs aren't flowing. But only once — in a confrontation with Hoffman in which he says, "I have a love in my life, and it gives me strength you wouldn't believe" — does Sandler ever exhibit the emotional range necessary to pull off the sort of character Anderson has written for him. Anderson clearly meant for Egan's life-eroding pre-Lena instability to translate over the course of the film into, well, punch-drunk love, but the sort of subtleties that such a transition requires are lost in Sandler's 100-decibel insanity. By the end of the movie, Egan is more confident and a little less unstable, but he's still unappealing.

Punch-Drunk Love is otherwise a beautiful set piece, less a narrative than a series of intricately choreographed dances. The scenes begin quietly, slowly, but by their end trucks are crashing into cars, the background music is rushing to the forefront and Barry is kicking out the sliding glass doors in his sister's condo.

Much shorter than Anderson's earlier efforts, Punch-Drunk Love is nevertheless just as detailed. It's like a Joseph Cornell box, an overflowing bounty of lovely weirdness, something you could stare at for hours and never tire of. Novelty plungers, pudding cups, a harmonium. It's just a shame that at the center of the box sits Adam Sandler.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)