Love Like No Other
Adam Sandler fans and P.T. Anderson fans will both be surprised by the transcendent, visually dazzling Punch-Drunk Love
by Donna Bowman
Punch-Drunk Love
dir.: P.T. Anderson
R, 89 min.
Now showing at area theaters
Audiences at Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film Punch-Drunk Love are no doubt composed of two distinct, non-overlapping groups: P.T. Anderson fans and Adam Sandler fans. A film that brings such enemies to the same table already has done its good deed, even before the reels start to roll. When it turns out to be a minor masterpiece—a tightly focused character study with brilliant imagery, a redemption for the sprawl and bluster of Anderson’s ambitious but flawed Boogie Nights and fatally ambitious Magnolia—it earns its Eagle Scout badge in one miraculous leap.
Not that either group in the audience is likely to go away happy, if they don’t open their minds to something entirely new. Sandler’s casting as Barry Egan, a plunger salesman with anger management issues, does not play off any of his established personae: faux naïf, wisecracking Semite, idiot savant. He creates something new and daring, a tightrope walk between perennial loser (albeit one who owns a small business and exhibits sporadic social skills) and psychopath (albeit one who knows he needs help and shows remorse for his violence). When he rescues a harmonium from the side of the road and meets a girl, Lena (played by Emily Watson), on the same day, he takes the first step across that tightrope. The suspense of the story is whether he will fall off or make it to the other side, pulled by some mysterious, kaleidoscopic dream of love.
Standing in his way are his seven sisters, whose success in attaining the pleasures of spouses and kids would mock solitary Barry even if his siblings didn’t constantly remind him of his youthful embarrassments and routinely expect his failure. Unable to find someone to talk to about his periodic fits of rage, he calls a phone-sex service for a confidential chat. But his trust is betrayed by the unscrupulous proprietor, a mattress-store owner in Utah (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman), and Barry finds himself on the wrong end of a shakedown that threatens both his bank account and his nascent relationship with Lena.
Few films under 90 minutes provide as many symbols to unpack, or as many dazzling visual tropes to analyze. Anderson’s longtime cinematographer Robert Elswit places the camera at heights ranging from curb to desktop level, producing wide, larger-than-life vistas of suburban mundanity (storage units, grocery stores) and turning them into stages on which magical transformations seem possible but not predestined. Horizontal lines dominate the compositions, even in the deliberate lens flares that bisect the frame, but then the glitter-filled handles of hundreds of plungers glow and grow vertically, like candles on an altar. Telephones interrupt, threaten and travel far beyond their useful range, then come to life like magic carpets when a connection is finally made.
At times in the past, Anderson has seemed trapped by his emulation of Robert Altman, most notably in the blatantly Short Cuts-inspired Magnolia. With Punch-Drunk Love, he captures the fleeting magic of moments in Altman’s grand folly Popeye and then upends them, transcends them, creating something wholly his own. No matter what viewers expect to see, they wind up seeing something far more significant: the stunning success of an original vision and the maturation of an artist.
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