Overall Rating
 Awesome: 48.96%
Worth A Look: 16.67%
Average: 17.19%
Pretty Bad: 7.29%
Total Crap: 9.9%
11 reviews, 126 user ratings
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| Punch-Drunk Love |
by Erik Childress
"An Insane Romantic Comedy.....Just Like Love Itself!"
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It would take some kind of mad genius to get critics to give high praise to a film starring Adam Sandler. Fortunately for the world of film, Paul Thomas Anderson is that mad genius. After two-and-a-half hours of Boogie Nights and over three of Magnolia, P.T. swore to the studios that his next film would be a 90-minute Sandler comedy. And he was straight-faced. He certainly succeeded in getting the length right, but his version of an Adam Sandler comedy is different than what fans of Happy Gilmore and The Wedding Singer identify with. Anderson has taken what we regularly see from the comedian and molded a character just for him into a story that is so fresh, so original, so twisted and insane that Sandler fans and foes may not know what to make of it, at least at first sight.The Sandler persona has played a variation of itself in every film he’s headlined; a soft-spoken guy who occasionally throws a hell-beating on someone. There was never much of a reason for it, but it was always good a laugh-filled comuppance. Anderson has taken that variation and supplied it with a motive. Sandler plays Barry Egan, a mild-mannered novelty salesman who has been tormented by his seven sisters since childhood. When unable to forget about the horrible treatment he’s received, he’s prone to fits of violent rage. (A nice warmup for Sandler’s 2003 comedy, Anger Management, with Jack Nicholson.)
His sister, Elizabeth (Mary Lynn Rajskub), insists on setting him up with a co-worker but his temperance would rather keep him alone in his apartment to try phone sex. That is until he discovers that Elizabeth’s friend is Lena Leonard (Emily Watson) whom Barry met in a chance encounter just the morning before and felt an instant allure, if not love at first sight. This extraordinary second meeting occurs in an out-of-control sequence where you can feel Barry on the verge of a nervous breakdown, dealing with work, his sisters and threats from his interactive phone partner to extort money from him and Anderson takes us right along with him.
Punch-Drunk Love is a romantic fable, pure and simple. The rest of the film deals exclusively with the burgeoning relationship between Barry and Lena, a woman who accepts Barry for who he is and makes it easy for him to love her. Examine the way she holds him when they embrace and how she tells him things that he has to do, not out of a desire for control or bitchiness, but simple tips that any man in love with a woman should follow.
P.T. Anderson understands the grandness of romance and how love is the great equalizer that can calm us of our daily ills and bring out joys in our lives that we never knew were possible. While no doctor diagnoses what troubles Barry, a trend towards obsessive compulsiveness in buying Healthy Choice products to rack up frequent flyer miles turns into a quixotic gesture to fly out and be with Lena. Scenes like this parlayed with a grocery store dance of joy, Barry’s desperation to find Lena’s apartment door for their first kiss or how their silhouettes meet in the colors of Hawaii are the moments romantics long for in the movies.
Sandler either gives an extraordinary performance or Anderson has just painted in everything around that persona was missing. His turn as Barry is funny, pathetic and at times, scary; a mask of unconfidence and longing that finally finds his yang in Watson’s Lena. If Anderson is the artist here than Watson is the paint. She accomplishes what the great actresses in romantic tales do; she makes you fall in love with her. You can have the best writing in the world, but if you don’t have someone who knows how to speak or to give you that perfect look in their eyes, than the connection won’t stick. Watson’s does and it’s a glorious performance. And if Watson is the paint, than Philip Seymour Hoffman is a Pollock painting in a tornado, as Anderson gives him carte blanche as a sleazy furniture salesman to just fly over-the-top.It’s taken me a few days, but each passing one makes me appreciate Punch-Drunk Love all the more. My second viewing cinched it. The Sandler elite and detractors of Magnolia may squint their eyes, look baffled in all its maniacal strokes and go Barry Egan on those who recommended it to them, but it may be worth the beating because films like this don’t come along too often. From the shocking opening scene to the symbolic harmonium, it’s funny, strange and imaginatively romantic. There may not seem to be much to Punch-Drunk Love until it finally dawns on you that it’s about love. What more is there to say?
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=6201&reviewer=198
originally posted: 10/16/02 14:04:05
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USA
11-Oct-2002 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
03-Apr-2003
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