For anyone not paying attention to the film world in the early 2000s, it’s hard to express just how confounding it was when the first announcement of Paul Thomas Anderson’s follow-up film to Boogie Nights and Magnolia simply stated, “Untitled Adam Sandler Film.” Sandler wasn’t yet the critical punching bag he’d become in the 2010s, but coming off of 2000’s Little Nicky and a cameo in the abysmal Rob Schneider joint The Animal the following year, he was still close to the bottom of the list of stars expected to lead the next film from the young, hot shot director who liberally drew on the works of Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese.
As the story goes, PTA saw something in Sandler, particularly in 1999’s Big Daddy of all places, that the rest of the culture wasn’t picking up on. Sandler not only fascinated Anderson, and, of course, made him laugh, but drew him to explore a different side of the actor’s on-screen persona, or rather, to thoroughly analyze it, viewing it through a prism that would refract and reveal the hidden complexities that lurked within Sandler’s impossibly angry, perpetually befuddled man-child characters. As big and wild a swing as Punch-Drunk Love seemed on paper, in retrospect, it marks a distinctive shift in Anderson’s oeuvre away from the more turbulent, coke-fueled ensemble pieces with an array of complicated, interwoven narratives that put him on the map and towards the thornier, more meticulous and hyper-focused character pieces that have defined his career over the past two decades. It was also Anderson’s way, especially after complaints of Magnolia’s pomposity, of taking himself a bit less seriously and finding new challenges by working within the formal constraints of the 90-minute romantic comedy.
While Punch-Drunk Love certainly works as a romantic comedy, and quite beautifully so, it’s what it does to stretch the boundaries of the genre, both narratively and stylistically, and how it uses tried and true tropes as a means of examining the myriad idiosyncrasies of its protagonist, Barry (Sandler), that make it such an endlessly fascinating, yet still delightfully entertaining, work. Case in point: it’s not uncommon for a rom-com lead to be shy or even anxiety-ridden, so caught up in their own work life or personal hang-ups to connect with another soul. Yet, Barry initially carries none of their typically underlying charm or conventional good looks, hidden, inevitably, only behind a pair of glasses or a bad haircut. Rather, he’s a tightly wound ball of anxiety who is so overwhelmed by the constant harping of his seven sisters and the bizarre and seemingly constant intrusions of an outside world that seems hell-bent on his destruction that he walks around like an open wound, with his only coping mechanism being his boundless passivity and propensity to comply. In short, he’s far closer to the distressingly agitated protagonist of Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland than the lead of a Hollywood rom-com.
Instead, Barry is – as if previous Sandler characters had all their chaotic energy and behavior been directed inwards, only barely able to contain all their anger and frustrations beneath a placid facade of amiability – like a balloon always about to pop and relieved only by brief explosions of released air to decrease the pressure. We see these explosions from time to time, whether it’s Barry shattering windows in his sister’s house after his siblings’ passive aggressive belittling drives him to the breaking point or his smashing up the restaurant bathroom after learning that one sister, Elizabeth (Mary Lynn Rajskub), told her co-worker Lena (Emily Watson), whom Barry is on a first date with, an embarrassing story of when he threw a hammer through a window as a child. They’re the type of sudden outbursts that Sandler’s characters are known for, yet here they’re bolstered by a newfound empathy, a depth of feeling that Anderson creates by mining the tension between Barry’s quest to be a genuinely good guy and his utter lack of emotional maturity to deal with his feelings of anger and self-loathing, let alone the world at large.
For as much of a departure as this is from Anderson’s previous three features, it still bears the influence of Robert Altman in everything from the zooms and use of “He Needs Me” from the director’s underrated Popeye to its stunningly complex and playful use of sound and music. There is of course Jon Brion’s gorgeously lilting score and the integration of the harmonium Barry finds on the street, and gradually repairs, restoring its ability to create melody (a blunt metaphor for his own character arc, yet so elegantly and unconventionally wound into the narrative that it transcends its potential hokiness). But the Altmanesque touches come less through music than in the sound design—overlapping, multitrack dialogue in several scenes and arrhythmic patterns of speech. Only Anderson uses this not as an egalitarian means of making no character more important than any other, but rather as a purely subjective way of mirroring the clutter and confusion of Barry’s mind thanks to his inability to exist in the moment without being drawn somewhere (or to someone) else.
Of course, for all the sonic techniques the film uses to get inside Barry’s head, it’s also extremely funny in the ways it reveals the external chinks in his armor through his awkward interpersonal behavior. His various slips in speech—saying “very food” instead of “very good” or “back” instead of “Jack”—or his physicality as he’s pulled between calls with the phone sex worker who blackmails him or Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s delightfully blustering Mattress Man and the attention of co-workers, sisters or even Lena demand of him. And for as mesmerizing and pitch perfect as Sandler is in his role, it’s worth noting Watson’s stellar performance, giving Lena an effortless air of normalcy and sweetness while still matching Barry’s strangeness, be it through quietly stalking him early on or matching his violent phrases when the two lovingly talk about wanting to destroy one another’s faces because they love them so much.
Indeed, it’s quite the feat that Anderson so perfectly balances the sweet, sugary surface of the film (thanks in large part to Brion’s score and Robert Elswit’s eye-popping cinematography) with the darker undercurrents running just beneath it. As such, it carries all the humor, joy and charm of great classic rom coms, but also adds the weight of a psychologically rich character study that’s rounded out with a slew of great supporting performances and an audiovisual palette that’s sadly far more complex than most entries in the genre could dream of.
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