I
don't get Adam Sandler. I sometimes find him funny, but I often have trouble
seeing the human being behind the mush-mouthed infantilism and blind rage that
constitute his screen persona. Sandler specializes in playing petulant
man-children who act up until grown-up circumstances set them straight, but the
second part of that equation has never felt authentic in any of his movies.
Sandler really does seem like one of the 13-year-old boys that have been his
bread-and-butter for years: He thrives on lowbrow jokes and violent slapstick,
and his characters are pathologically self-centered and nearly incapable of
generating compassion for anyone else. When he's finally forced to value his
ridiculously hot wife and family in Click, or learn to run the family business in Billy
Madison,
he wears the vaguely sullen expression of a brat being forced to apologize to
his sister, even if he doesn't really mean it. If the formula didn't require
him to grow up—and Sandler is certainly a slave for formula—he'd
play the naïf for eternity.
It
would be wrong to say that P.T. Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love is the Adam Sandler movie
for people who hate Adam Sandler movies. (Though that sentiment definitely
applies to me.) For one, Anderson is an ardent fan of Sandler's work, and
conceived this 90-minute comedy around him as a downshift—in scope, if
not ambition—from Anderson's operatic opus Magnolia. But more importantly,
Anderson succeeds in capturing Sandler's essence in a way that none of his star
vehicles ever could. In Punch-Drunk Love, all those qualities that comprise the
Sandler persona—the simpleton's innocence, the pained inarticulateness,
the propensity for violence—have been sharpened and magnified.
(Fortunately, Anderson had the good sense to excise Sandler's blue-collar
posturing altogether.) It's a uniquely unsettling experience: Dark, tightly
wound, and disturbingly arrhythmic, yet sweet and disarming, too, with more
authentic feeling than anything else in Sandler's filmography.
Sandwiched
between the epic achievements of Magnolia and There Will Be Blood, Punch-Drunk Love may seem like a minor
work at first glance, but it's just as formally daring and adventurous. The act
of casting a star of Sandler's caliber in a film this experimental is chancy
enough, especially when you consider Sandler's stubborn entrenchment within a
very narrow set of comedic parameters. Keith Phipps, in his Mr. Deeds review, puts it better
than I ever could:
Which
character to play, the smartass or the naïf? Which marketable but affordable
actress should co-star? Which old friend will direct, Dennis Dugan or Steven
Brill? What classic-rock staple will be featured prominently on the soundtrack,
trailers, and television ads? Which fast-food chain will receive absurdly
prominent placement? Answers for Mr. Deeds: The naïf, Winona Ryder, Brill, Pete
Townshend's "Let My Love Open The Door," and the one with Frosties,
chili, and Biggie fries.
For
me, Punch-Drunk Love marked the moment when Anderson threw away the stylistic
crutches of forbears like Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman, and came into his
own as an original filmmaker. That doesn't mean he's discarded these and other
influences altogether, which isn't something he could or would want to do. But Punch-Drunk
Love has
a unique texture that's unmistakably Anderson's, marked by a wired, coked-up
intensity and a yen for discord. It's a film that sets viewers on edge from the
start, almost daring you not to like it. And considering how shamelessly
Sandler's other films work to ingratiate themselves to the audience, that alone
is an achievement.
Anderson
kicks off the film in typically audacious fashion: In the early morning, Barry
Egan (Sandler), the boss of a novelty plunger (or "funger") operation, wanders
out of his nondescript L.A. warehouse space and peers out onto the street.
Suddenly, a car blows out a tire and cartwheels violently past his line of
vision. Just as quickly, a van pulls up alongside him, a sliding door opens,
and out comes a harmonium, slammed on the pavement in front of him. It's a
surreal moment, with one bizarre incident following another and no discernable
relationship between the two, like some sort of cosmic non sequitur. There's no
use trying to force a connection between the two events, or even ponder what
force beckoned Barry to the streets to begin with. What's important is that we
get a good sense of the chaos that swirls around him and taunts him, beckoning
him into startling outbursts. He's a Bruce Banner type—an ordinary guy
who turns into a green smashing monster when he's pushed too far.
Every
aspect of Barry's life is humbling, even humiliating: He peddles plungers to
hotel chains for a living, fields calls from seven sisters who make him the
focus of their attention and love to embarrass him, lives in a tiny apartment
with cheap blinds and IKEA-quality furniture, and tries to salve his loneliness
by collecting frequent flyer miles for trips he'll never take and chatting up a
woman named "Georgia" on a phone-sex line, only to get extorted for money. One
of his sisters pushes him to meet a workmate, but Barry seems so mortified by
his life that he tries to squirm out of the meeting. When his sister finally
drags her friend Lena Leonard (Emily Watson) into the warehouse for an
introduction, Barry scrambles to make a good impression. This clip only shows
the second half of perhaps the film's greatest sequence, as Barry makes
conversation with Lena while trying to cover up the multitude of mishaps around
him.
As
hard as Barry tries to put a gloss on his situation, he's no good at hiding his
flopsweat; it's clear to anyone who cares to look that his life is falling
apart like the splitting seams on a cheap blue suit. Yet Lena calmly looks past
the chaos and likes what she sees, which puts her in a category of female
romantic leads that my cohort Nathan Rabin calls the "manic pixie dream girl,"
after Kirsten Dunst's character in Elizabethtown. MPDGs are whimsical,
improbably gorgeous creatures that materialize out of nowhere and are somehow
moved to adopt feeble protagonists who are barely holding onto the bottom rung.
Where most women would seek romantic fulfillment elsewhere, MPDGs work their
rejuvenating charm on broken men, like Will Smith working the hitch out of Matt
Damon's golf swing in The Legend Of Bagger Vance. And what do they expect
in return? Precious little.
The
Lena character really shouldn't work, for the reasons most MPDGs don't work,
because she offers up the full force of her charisma (and patience) and doesn't
get back what she puts in. Yet the casting here is key: Watson's signature role
in Lars von Trier's Breaking The Waves, as a deeply religious woman who devotes
herself to her husband with equal fervor, emphasizes her childlike innocence
even when it's tarnished by repeated degradation. Watson projects that innocence
again in Punch-Drunk Love and recognizes it in Sandler's Barry, which
forgives him a lot of sins throughout the film, like when he smashes up a
restaurant bathroom on their first date, or abandons her at a hospital to seek
revenge on the men who put her there. Their relationship is pure romantic
fantasy, but they make an odd sort of sense together. How many other couples
could share pillow talk like this?
Not
enough can be said about the importance of Jon Brion's score, which is as much
a part of the fabric of the film as, say, Philip Glass' music for Mishima or Clint Mansell and the
Kronos Quartet's work on Requiem For A Dream. At its most dissonant,
like in the clip above where Lena meets Barry at the warehouse, the music
threatens to trample the comedy, because the various percussive clangs in
Brion's music are violent and arrhythmic, too disturbing for laughs. But I
think the lack of laugh-out-loud comedy is a fair trade-off for getting such a
strong, visceral impression of what it's like to live in Barry's world, where
nothing seems to play in tune. Yet when Barry finally finds refuge in Lena's
arms, Brion's orchestration becomes incredibly lush and inviting, as delicate
string arrangements overcome the din. The miracle of the score is that it
covers such a broad range of emotional territory while still sounding like a
single, cohesive piece of music. (Based on this and Jonny Greenwood's There
Will Be Blood
score, Anderson is clearly in another league when it comes to collaborating
with musicians.)
Seeing Punch-Drunk Love
didn't turn me around on Sandler, though I acknowledge that the movie wouldn't
exist without him. (For comedic rage, he has nothing on Philip Seymour Hoffman,
who easily steals the few scenes he's in as the Provo sleazebag behind the
sex-chat scam.) I tend to think of Punch-Drunk Love as a movie built less
around Sandler the actor than Sandler the cultural phenomenon. Had he been a
complete unknown, I don't think the casting would have worked, but in light of
Sandler's career playing belligerent juveniles in an adult body, Anderson's
stunt pays dividends that wouldn't have been possible with another actor in the
lead. It's weird to consider that those precious hours wasted on the likes of The
Waterboy
and Little Nicky
now seem productive, but Anderson comes closer than anyone ever has (or will)
in figuring out the Sandler enigma. And that's some kind of achievement.
Coming
Up:
Camp
Month
Next
Week: Wild Things
July
10: Road House
July
17: Manos: The Hands Of Fate vs. Troll 2
July
24: Showgirls