PUNCH-DRUNK STYLE
by Pat Padua

Punch-Drunk Love is P.T. Anderson's sweetest examination of dysfunctional families to date. It has the complexity of a living being, with an attractive if odd and imperfect shell - and a lot going on inside the shell if you take a chance and look inside - or get out of it.

P.T. Anderson

Cinematographer Robert Elswit, who has shot all of Anderson's films, makes bold choices. In the first five minutes of PDL, he does at least two things a photographer isn't supposed to do: shoot into the sun, which gives off a distracting glare; and underexpose interiors so that Barry (Adam Sandler) seems to be walking into a fade-to-black when he's simply walking from the lit end of his warehouse box office to the unlit end. He does this to open the door (like the curtain at a roadhouse show?) and let in a shock of natural light - which of course overexposes and washes out exteriors.

The underexposure (and the widescreen) makes this a film that will be all but impossible to see properly on a TV screen. Is this a ploy to be inaccessible to the video market? (Not that the typical renter will give a damn.) Or perhaps this also speaks to the character: Sandler is lit with an extreme Rembrandt angle of light, illuminating just the edges of his face (as his personality's edges are definitely illuminated in the film), obscuring his features but revealing the burrow he has dug for himself where he can hide from the world.

The photographic glare comes into play when he meets Emily Watson. It's as if after years of abuse from his seven sisters (at a family gathering, his sisters fondly recall how they called him "gay-boy"), he doesn't know how to process the appearance of somebody who would respect him.

In the scenes set in a supermarket, Anderson (or Elswit) quotes photographer Andreas Gursky's gorgeous shot of a 99-cent store, glowing with aisles of colors and patterns that make a kind of consumable kaleidoscope, all in the name of making a buck. Like Anderson, and Sandler, Gursky finds beauty in the banal - even the vulgar banal, in the case of a 99-cent store.

And what about the animation? The fake stars are romantic, sure, but what of the flourescent vertical stripes? An abstraction of supermarket aisles? The rorshach globs of fuschia - do these represent the glory of natural - human - asymmetries? Does the animation abstract Barry's progress, breaking out of the widescreen aisles of commerce and consumption, the corporate seduction and suggestion and call to conformity? Or does it reflect the harmony possible between the two, the static company line and the dynamic individual? After all, Barry finds great joy in pudding (who wouldn't?), and his unique self can dance at ease with the world of consumer conformity. He's not laughing at it, but with it.

Watch Barry grow. Having dinner with Lena (the so-adorable Emily Watson), he is at first obviously uncomfortable, but in telling even the banal story he's telling (and as he becomes more animated, the story seems less banal) he finds a comfort level with another person - until she reminds him of his sister's teasing, which sends him into a rage where he destroys the restaurant bathroom. You know what this reminded me of? Klaus Kinski, who in his autobiography All I Need is Love and in Werner Herzog's doc My Best Fiend, expresses a fascinatingly broad range of human emotion. Kinski's rage is his signature, and seeing him smile is wonderful but somehow unreal, unbelievable through no fault of his own, but just from the audience's fear that the smile simply disguises the rage you know is coming at any minute.

Now look at Sandler. The harmless puppy persona does reveal hostility on occasion: his comedy CD was called "They're all gonna laugh at you" - a title that refers not simply to a comedy club, but a subjection to terrible mockery, voiced by an unsupported grandmother figure. Then the puppy growls, and Sandler's not-quite-composure disintegrates into a rage. I daresay that range of personality seems more integrated than Kinski's. Despite the social awkwardness, the fact that Barry can express such vulnerability and such aggression - both believably - is encouraging, and likeable.

Is that what Emily Watson sees in him? She too is needy and love-starved, and you wonder what drew her to him. But in an episode of pillow talk both sweet and darkly funny, you watch in awe at two people who accept each other's insanity, happy to go along for the ride on each other's emotional range.

©2002 Pat Padua
CineScene