Punch-Drunk Love
by Shari L. Rosenblum

In the beginning of Punch-Drunk Love, the latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson (Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia), we find Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) in an abyssal womblike hollow of a warehouse, at a desk in the corner of the bay, in the corner of the screen, wearing an electric blue suit with an unreal neon glare that wouldn't fit in anywhere in the workaday real world. We watch him question someone intensely over the phone about the disclaimer details of an apparently ill-conceived advertised offer, step out into the just-past-dawn glow of the day, coffee cup in hand, and look down the long white-lit alley toward the street. The moment - his and ours - is suddenly jarred by the loud percussive bounce of a somersaulting car, and then punctuated back to calm with the mysterious taxicab deposit of a harmonium onto the sidewalk. Seconds later, the euphonic Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), all self-possessed curves in popsicle pastel pink, comes down that same alley and - without any evidence of the cliché that it might have been - into Egan's life.

So begins the oddly engaging, self-realizing, absurd and absurdist, pseudosurreal romantic fairytale that has film snobs nationwide extolling the praises of the erstwhile Waterboy.

Despite rumors to the contrary, the protagonist and primal energy of the film is distinctively Sandler-esque - goofy and dumb, sweet and endearing, and brimming with explosive anger. Whether or not it is true that writer/director Anderson wrote the role with Sandler in mind, it is without question that no one else could play the role quite as well as he. Disdained though Sandler often is, there is not another actor out there today who can combine dangerous undercore with childlike sincerity in quite his captivating - nearly unintimidating - way (see The Wedding Singer or Happy Gilmore), or who could make Anderson's Egan - a subtly seething novelty-plunger manufacturer/salesman - seem quite so lovable.

Of course, the credit is not all due to Sandler. Anderson's directorial gifts are strongly in evidence here, as he restrains the restrained and lets loose the combustible in Sandler's trademark bipolarist. With the help of cinematographer Robert Elswit's derring-do, he transforms the film's straightforward romantic theme into visual expressionism, frames the Egan character in an almost mystical light - sometimes quite literally - and translates his experiences, and his emotions, into brazen colored abstractions. The result is mythical in its dimensions and grounded in its fantasies, at once artsy and cartoonish, like the poignant "Popeye" theme that warbles through its tenderest moments.

The mythos is further enhanced by the film's structure, which has Egan plagued by seven sisters, a sort of inverse Iante to their hellish Hyades, constellarly raining down on his parade, and by four underworld brothers who seek retribution for his sins (a late-night lonely hearts phone call). He makes his way through Anderson's actual constructed passages (alleys, hallways, and airplane entries) and filmed-as-labyrinth obstacles (apartment buildings and streets). And he performs a series of tasks (here involving Healthy Choice pudding) to win the prize (not to mention a million frequent flyer miles, and all their Freudian permutations).

As with the boy meets girl of any fairytale, the film's sexuality is mostly in the imaginary - off screen and in this case some might say off-kilter, but Watson's wide-eyed serenity and unabashed intensity make her appeal x-ratable. Sandler does not do - and could not carry off, even with Anderson's actorly direction - the brooding, Hollywood hooligan whose sizzle makes us spark. His characters, though overtly sexed, are not outwardly sexual. Their desire and their desirousness - repulsed, repressed or obsessed - is contained within the image on the screen. But awkward though he is, it isn't pity that we feel for him, that we know Lena feels for him; it's empathy. It's connection.

And if we buy the arrested little boy blue in the romance of the rose-pink savior, it is because their ragged, jagged, non-conforming edges click together like cut-to-specs pieces in a magical misfit puzzle.

Punch-Drunk Love is perhaps above all a visceral experience. With an artfilm air and a multiplex echo, it bleeds a sunlit romantic fantasy of Kool-Aid blue and pink through a realist nightshade screen of loneliness - details its human silences with alternating outbursts of harmony and dissonance - and makes us feel the inarticulable.

It is as disarming as it is fantastical.

©2002 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene