Punch-drunk Love By Peter Tonguette Peter Tonguette was Staff Critic for The Film Journal from 2002 to 2005.  His writing has also appeared in Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal, Contracampo, and 24fps Magazine.

It might come as a shock to some readers when I say that Paul Thomas Anderson's new film Punch-Drunk Love --a film bent on creating its own eccentric, splintered, and love crazy world--is a film thoroughly engaged with life at this particular, seemingly terminal, moment in American history.

It's a shock, perhaps, because some might wonder what on earth a film this playful and attuned to its own whims and flights of fancy could have to do with our own world in even the most superficial sense, let alone what meaningful correlation could be drawn between the two. David Denby clearly wondered this when he wrote in The New Yorker that, "Anderson wants to say something quirky and powerful about love and the miraculousness of ordinary lives, but his world neither intersects with ours at any point nor hangs together as an independent magical creation."

But I'm writing this essay in the autumn of 2002, an autumn which will best be remembered for this country's preparations for seemingly unstoppable war with Iraq and for the actions of a civilian, Army-trained sniper in Maryland. It's a violent, confusing and maddening time to live in America--to state the plainly obvious--and yet it's in this atmosphere that we must conduct our own daily lives and continue our own private quests for happiness, love, and connection. Because American life is so superficially placid--compared to Israel, Palestine, or, yes, Iraq, life is downright comfortable--it's easy to be lulled into thinking that things are alright, that danger is never really near. But that, too, is part of what this film's subtext considers: how easily the seemingly benign can become violent.

Denby is correct in so far as Punch-Drunk Love doesn't make a single reference to any real life events. But through its dual-natured eccentricities it manages to capture the feel of life in post-9/11 America better than any other film I can think of, including Michael Moore's vaunted
Bowling for Columbine, which has both the advantage and disadvantage of tackling its issues head-on. But, as much as I admire Moore's film, I prefer Anderson's indirect poetic address.

The director selects a choice image--having his characters frequently enter buildings from blindingly blown-out exteriors--to provide a visual metaphor for his characters' flee from the chaos of the outside world. This is echoed in several other choices in the film which may at first seem like stylistic window-dressing. For example, in the film's opening sequence, we see two vehicles approaching peacefully from the distance on a quiet road. Suddenly roaring noise explodes on the soundtrack as they pass by the camera, one of them crashing disastrously, seemingly for no reason. Uncontrollable and unpredictable violence of this sort threatens to disrupt nearly every scene.

But this is ultimately a picture about trying to find love and connection within such circumstances, circumstances which are presented by Anderson as a given. Punch-Drunk Love is, then, a very political film that manages to have profound and thoughtful things to say about American life without resorting to the frequently tired and obvious didacticism of "issue" movies or the ideological baggage of explicitly political manifestos. Have I mentioned yet that it stars Adam Sandler?

To give any kind of realistic representation of the picture's fractured universe, a brief plot summary is necessary. Sandler, in a performance which both reveals new depths to his acting and plays off of his established on-screen persona, plays Barry Egan, a character virtually defined by his anxiety, apprehensiveness, and sad and quiet longing. He runs his own business--which involves the buying and selling of plumbing products--but, as he confesses early in the movie, is prone to sudden outbursts of violence and has a problem with crying. Fussed over mercilessly by his seven sisters (yes, seven sisters), he is even hesitant about attending a birthday party for one of them and his anxiety is increased tenfold when the prospect of being introduced to a girl at the party is introduced. In his spare time Barry has discovered a loophole in a Healthy Choice promotional contest which promises to reap millions of frequent flyer miles for him with the purchase of a few hundred dollars worth of pudding--no matter that he doesn't fly and has never been on a plane. Barry is in flight all right, but his life is almost synonymous with stagnation and immobility.

Single, he pathetically calls a phone sex line one particularly lonely evening, an act which will come back to haunt him. (A parenthetical observation: Anderson probably wouldn't cop to this charge in a million years, but he's at heart a deeply moralistic filmmaker and if there's anything which mars his increasingly impressive body of work to date, it's the self-righteous, God-like judgments he is prone to dole out to his characters on the basis of their moral worth. The most egregious example came in his most overrated film, Magnolia [1999], when Philip Baker Hall's disreputable Jimmy Gator is killed by the rain of frogs after revelations
surface that he may have abused his estranged daughter. It's lazy, if morally comforting, cinema.)

Into Barry's life walks Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), an acquaintance of one of his sisters. Lena, probably against a lot of the audience's better judgment given Barry's erratic behavior, seeks him out relentlessly. So resistant is Barry to anything resembling change, Lena does more or less everything short of taking him at gunpoint to persuade him to take her out on a date. Slowly, carefully, and with the tenderness one would expect from a Renoir or Lubitsch, Anderson permits Barry to fall--and fall hard--for Lena. And because it's been Anderson's stated intent for some time to build movies out of the small moments in life that everyone takes for granted, all it takes is a single dinner out together for Barry's life to be forever marked by this woman's presence in his world.

Watson is luminous as Lena, practically a gulf of sanity and stability in a universe defined by hysteria. We impart our sense of this woman--her authority, her grace, her backbone--from Anderson's bravura mise en scene. One particularly lovely Steadicam shot follows Lena from behind as she is walking away from the camera--it's an off-the-cuff shot, of no thematic or narrative importance per se, but Anderson holds it for longer than we expect and through it we
somehow glean all we need to know about this woman and her persistence, her mad pursuit of love. That Lena isn't played by a Hollywood starlet is a breath of fresh air but also a daring challenge to unquestioned Hollywood modus operandi.

Similarly, a conventional romantic comedy would more or less stop at this juncture, ending with Barry and Lena's successful communion. But Anderson refuses to let the brutal world fade into the darkness simply because Barry has found love within it. There's the matter of the phone sex company which is attempting to extort him of thousands of dollars and has dispatched a gang of four blonde brothers (yes, four blonde brothers, in addition to the seven
sisters) to collect, ultimately threatening Lena's life. But, in truth, violence has promised to dismantle Barry and Lena's love from virtually the beginning: the film is like a romance in a war zone of rage and brutality.

In what is unquestionably my favorite sequence from an American film this year, Anderson takes an extended music cue from Robert Altman's Popeye (1980)--Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl, plaintively singing "He Needs Me"--places it over an extended montage of Barry tracking down Lena in Hawaii, and turns it into something resembling a symphonic ode to love found. It's a masterful and utterly unexpected stroke. Anderson has always looked to the collected films of Altman for inspiration. (1) But what's deeply encouraging about Punch-Drunk Love is how smart and restrained Anderson has become in referencing the master's work. "He Needs Me" beautifully and simply expresses the anxious longings of his characters; I'd take it in a
heartbeat over the more elaborate referencing of Nashville (1975) and Short Cuts (1993) that Anderson indulged in for Magnolia. Anderson's use of the song also makes us want to reconsider the often neglected virtues of Altman's film, which has at its center one of the most uncomplicated expressions of pure love in his canon.

Punch-Drunk Love is a singular achievement, painful and sublime.

FOOTNOTE:

(1) But the relationship between master and apprentice seems amicable, even friendly. The tornado and ensuing chaos which concludes Altman's Dr. T and the Women (2000) can easily be read as a nod to the infamous rain of frogs which concluded Magnolia. In turn, the rain of frogs was always seen as a blatant appropriation of the earthquake Altman ended Short Cuts with. In any case, on the basis of Dr. T and the Women, Altman welcomes Anderson's hero worship and seems paternally happy to return the favor.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002