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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Paul Thomas Anderson's strange and marvelous "Punch-Drunk Love" turns Adam Sandler into a leading man -- and brings the sweetness of romantic comedy to an alienated age.
Oct 11, 2002 | Walking out of Paul Thomas Anderson's "Punch-Drunk Love" I was certain of only two things: that I had no idea what I'd just seen, and that I wanted to see it again right away. By turns irritating, strange, and finally entrancing, "Punch-Drunk Love" is something we haven't seen before: a manic-depressive romantic comedy that aspires to the soul of a musical. It's a new-fashioned love song.
It's also Anderson's attempt to work on a smaller, less defined scale than he did in his multi-character epics "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia." The inspiration and touchstone for those films was the '70s work of Robert Altman, particularly "Nashville." Anderson's movies had the same huge appetite for character and incident, the need to keep encompassing more, to keep bringing new people into the party. But where Altman has always had a gambler's faith in chance, Anderson, the most ambitious young filmmaker in contemporary American movies, works in a precise, controlled manner.
Anderson may believe in chance, but until now he has never left much to it. You could see that in his debut, the marvelous neo-noir "Hard Eight." It was, for a first movie, almost frighteningly disciplined. And you could see it even amid the sprawl of the movies that followed. The extended tracking shot that opened "Boogie Nights," introducing almost all of the major characters in the process, was a wonderful contradiction, bravura filmmaking that orchestrated each flourish, each swoop and glide of the camera.
Anderson must have realized there was nowhere to go from "Magnolia" but into gigantism. So how does a filmmaker with his degree of ambition and need for control scale things down and free himself up? That seems to be the question that Anderson is asking himself throughout "Punch-Drunk Love," and part of the excitement of the movie comes from the way he wrestles with it. In some ways, he hasn't changed. Though the film is essentially a modest two-hander with a running time of 89 minutes, it's shot in widescreen Panavision, and the framing of each shot, the hard-edged yet diffuse light of the San Fernando Valley as captured in Robert Elswit's cinematography, is as meticulous as anything Anderson has done.
"Punch-Drunk Love"
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán
So is Christopher Scarabosio's sound design, which veers on a dime from silence to bursts of chaotic noise. Jon Brion's score, dominated by a wheezing harmonium, is layered under the action so that it swells like a wave slowly gathering devastating force. Because of the small scale of the story Anderson is telling here, the control he exerts is even more apparent.
What gives "Punch-Drunk Love" its thrilling and often unsettling aura of uncertainty is that from moment to moment there's no telling what will happen. Befitting the true spirit of romantic comedy, it's a movie where the characters teeter right on the edge of disaster. Even when they find their footing, there's no assurance that the ground beneath their feet will remain stable.
Right from the start the opportunity exists here for both discord and harmony. In the opening sequence, a car driving down a Valley street flips over for no apparent reason, and seconds later a taxi deposits a battered harmonium at the curb. (A harmonium is that rinky-dink little second cousin of the piano and the organ, and indeed nobody in the movie is ever quite sure what to call it.) As the movie's hero, Barry Egan, Adam Sandler carries the expectation of impending disaster in every inch of his lanky, lumbering frame.
A wholesaler of novelty bathroom supplies working out of a cavernous Valley warehouse, Barry exists in a nearly mute state of perpetual tentativeness. He has only the most minimal exchanges with his business partner Lance (Luis Guzmán), and when he has to make a sales pitch to a couple of prospective clients, you feel as if it's taking every ounce of his energy to keep up the patter. Making a call to a phone-sex line, Barry answers the operator's provocations with single syllables and yawning silences.
He's not much more comfortable at a family party for the birthday of one of his seven sisters. With aggression that they try to pass off as kidding affection, the sisters use Barry as their whipping boy while he stands around awkwardly, taking their teasing. (This sequence is remarkable. No previous movie has ever captured in quite this way how the controlled chaos of family gatherings can make you feel like everyone is claiming a piece of you.) Barry doesn't even seem at ease when he's alone, obsessively clipping bar codes from pudding containers to cash in for frequent-flyer miles, even though he has no intention of traveling anywhere.
