Thoughts on Punch-Drunk Love

     On Criterion, I watched Punch-Drunk Love, a 2002 romantic comedy/drama film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, and starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán, and Mary Lynn Rajskub.

    The film centers on Barry (Sandler), a lonely bachelor who owns a company that sells themed toilet plungers, and he bears the brunt of verbal abuse and insults from his seven sisters, seeing him as a loser and picking apart his turns of speech, like mocking him for saying "chatting" instead of "talking," and interrupting him at work with phone calls reminding him to come to one of their birthday parties. Barry is generally quiet and reserved, but prone to short fits of rage in destroying things or yelling at people, not having a healthy outlet for his pent-up anger.

    He also has a side plan going, finding a loophole in a Healthy Choice promotion and wanting to amass a million frequent flyer miles by saving the coupons from purchasing vast quantities of pudding, as Barry has done the math on the risk vs. reward and deciding the pudding was the best option to purchase instead of soup cans or frozen meals from Healthy Choice. This subplot was based from an actual story of David Phillips, a civil engineer who in 1999 figured out that the value of the frequent flyer miles from the Healthy Choice coupons was more than the cost of the pudding, and accumulated 1.2 million frequent flyer miles.

    Early in the film, he witnesses a horrendous car accident, and retrieves a harmonium from the street, keeping it on his desk and tinkering with it. His sister Elizabeth (Rajskub) brings by her co-worker Lena (Watson), who Barry had briefly met before, in order to get them to date, but Barry's life is in disarray. He is not only busy with work and his side hustle with the pudding, but he had called a phone sex line the night before out of curiosity, is swindled into giving his Social Security number, and the sex worker he had spoken to on the phone is calling back to extort him for money and sending "her" brothers after him to intimidate him. This gets in the way of his budding relationship with Lena, although the two of them have a sweet chemistry and a romantic innocence that draws them closer together.

    I really loved this film. This was my first time watching it, despite knowing how famous it is and that it came out well over twenty years ago, but I hadn't ever bothered to watch it before. The film podcast This Had Oscar Buzz did an episode of it, timing it with the upcoming release of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film One Battle After Another, and the hosts really liked it, and it sounded really interesting to me and like I should finally see it.

    Adam Sandler was fantastic in this, and I liked how he could snap back and forth between the sweet shyness of Barry with snapping into rage, in a way that didn't come off as cartoonish or exaggerated as it does in his usual comedies. According to the podcast, Anderson chose Sandler because of an old Saturday Night Live sketch he did, where he plays a guy who hosts his own public access TV show, "The Denise Show," where he is obsessed with his ex-girlfriend and taking calls from people keeping tabs on her for him, and essentially stalking her. When his dad calls him and berates him, like saying "You're embarrassing the family!" and "Be a man!" Sandler as the guy would shout back "Shut up! Shut up, old man!" and shouting him down, then snapping back to calm reality. Anderson really liked the weird comedy in it, and it works really well in this film.

    Emily Watson is so sweet in this, and while she is largely the love interest and not the focus like Sandler is, I still liked how sensitive her performance was, and how sexy and intimate her chemistry with Sandler was, like in a love scene in bed where they are whispering pillow talk like "I'm lookin' at your face and I just wanna smash it. I just wanna fuckin' smash it with a sledgehammer and squeeze it. You're so pretty" and "I want to chew your face, and I want to scoop out your eyes and I want to eat them and chew them and suck on them." And the silhouetted scenes of them embracing each other in front of windows are really beautiful imagery.

    The cinematographer was Robert Elswit, and his camerawork makes the film look stunning, especially in a lot of long take, panning shots that flows in musical symmetry with Jon Brion's experimental score of tones and sounds, as well as with the more romantic music reminiscent of Jacques Tati's 1960s French comedies. The visual interludes were done by the late artist Jeremy Blake, with gorgeous purple and blue colors blending against each other. "He Needs Me," a song from the 1980 film version of Popeye, sung by the late Shelley Duvall, plays in a scene too, and is a cute and endearing love song. The film was edited by Leslie Jones, and the scenes connect together really well to make for an oddball romantic comedy with an unusual musical score.

The film would be the start of Sandler's occasional dip outside of his mainstream comedies, with his acclaimed performances in Reign Over Me, Funny People, and Uncut Gems, in more dramatic roles and/or experimental indie films. It's obvious that he's more into his comfort zone with his more current Netflix comedies and children's films, but it is nice whenever he takes a break from that and does a more unusual film.

I just really found this movie both very romantic, with having the same weirdo spirit that both Anderson and Sandler share, and the film connected their wavelengths very well. I'm really happy I finally watched this.