In several ways, Punch Drunk Love is a different kind of movie. It’s a different kind of movie for its director, Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia). It’s a different kind of movie for its star, Adam Sandler (Billy Madison, The Wedding Singer). And it’s a different kind of movie for the theater-going public, especially for those who think they know what to expect when they hear the words “romantic comedy”.
The movie tells the story of a lonely, socially handicapped young man, Barry Egan (Sandler), who runs a small business that specializes in novelty toilet plungers. Life is just one long, blank concrete wall for Barry until one day he steps outside his office and finds a harmonium and the woman of his dreams, the beautiful, and slightly manic Lena Leonard (Emily Watson). Barry and Lena fall in love, while Barry struggles to overcome his emotional isolation. Along the way, he collects an awful lot of Healthy Choice pudding and does battle with the seedy cohorts of an aggressive phone sex operator. Breakfast at Tiffany’s this is not.
Yet for all the eccentricity of its plot, not to mention the extreme neuroses of its characters, the film is movingly tender and ultimately very romantic. It just approaches the idea of romance in a non-traditional way. There are no color-drenched sunsets or pastiches of precious moments with lovers walking in parks and buying each other ice cream; the film eschews such idealistic sentimentality and shows us instead two people fumbling toward communion in a disjointed, and often hostile, modern reality. It is, in part, a romantic comedy about romantic comedies; a film that breaks the illusion of love that so many films of this genre create. Such films are often distanced from real life. Through the story of an unhappy man who suffers from exactly this kind of distance, Punch Drunk Love posits that real romance is not found in separating from reality, but in embracing it.
The film is full of masterful touches that both embrace and subvert the traditional romantic comedy. In a touch of unabashed romanticism, a little light goes on inside a phone booth when Barry’s call goes through to Lena. But moments before, Barry has been screaming violent obscenities to his sister over the same phone. Barry races through the labyrinthine halls of an apartment complex to find Lena in a moment that is both comical and disturbing; comical because the situation is so absurd, disturbing because it suggests the possibility of not ever finding the loved one. Barry and Lena lay in typical backlit lovers embrace while Barry whispers in the tones of a Casanova, “I want to smash your face, you’re so pretty.” The film consistently maintains tension between sweetness and bitterness, between tenderness and violence, and constantly turns the formula of the romantic comedy on it’s head to reveal something much more profound about the strangeness and beauty of falling in love.
The film is director P.T. Anderson’s most daring, original, and emotionally affecting work to date. Gone is the gloss that covered Magnolia; gone is the baroque staginess of Boogie Nights. Those epic films were brilliant but strained to cover too much with too much affected grandeur. One always sensed that Anderson was looking to probe the deep mysteries of the human heart, but in his previous films that heart was often buried beneath his ambition and ornamentation.
Punch Drunk Love is simpler, spare, and more honest. At half the length of Anderson’s last two films, it says ten times as much about the nature of the heart. And without all the impressive but distracting fancy camera work, Anderson shows that he is capable of telling a story that doesn’t just dazzle the eyes, but hits you in the gut. Anderson has given up style for substance here, and his new approach strengthens the film’s message of trading in illusion for reality. The film is still stylized, but in a way that compliments its characters and its message.
Anderson has proven himself; he no longer needs to flex his directorial muscles to compete with the big boys. He is one of them now. And the film reflects a newfound self-assuredness and maturity. In a way, the film is about the coming of age of its director as much as it is of its protagonist.
It’s a coming of age for the man who plays this character as well. Adam Sandler has found in Barry Egan the perfect vehicle for becoming a mature actor. Barry has a lot in common with the characters Sandler usually plays in his occasionally brilliant, generally sophomoric, films. An underdeveloped man-child who retreats into self-delusion and aggressive behavior in order to protect himself from the world, Barry isn’t all that different from Billy Madison or Happy Gilmore. But here Sandler’s shtick has a surprising bite. It is as if someone had taken one of Sandler’s stock characters and placed him in the real world. Suddenly we see the emotional conflict, the pathos hidden behind the clowning. In another Sandler film, the scene where Barry shops for pudding in order to rack up free airline miles would be a farce of slapstick and dirty jokes. Here it is a heartbreaking glimpse into a man who is desperate to escape his life. Sandler pulls off the role beautifully…but then again he has always been playing it. He is just playing it for real this time.
Traditional “romantic comedies” tend to project a fantastic and unreal vision of love. Full of maudlin idealism, they are as divorced from reality as Sandler’s character is at the beginning of Punch Drunk Love. This film is largely about the breaking of illusion and coming to terms with living in the real world. It is about finding the strength in loving another person that allows one to face up to the courageous task of participating in life. It is about finding something that is not only beautiful but also real. And it seems to me that there is something honestly romantic in that.