The New Romantic Violence: A Consideration of Punch-Drunk Love By Sarah Crawford Sarah Crawford is a freelance critic based in Philadelphia. She's previously been published in periodicals, including the online film journal 24 Frames Per Second.

There is a line from Dickens, specifically in the fable-like The Old Curiosity Shop, that reads as follows: ". . . the world would do well to reflect, that injustice is in itself, to every generous and properly constituted mind, an injury, of all others the most insufferable, the most torturing and the most hard to bear; and that many clear consciences have gone to their account elsewhere, and many sound hearts have broken, because of this very reason; the knowledge of their own deserts only aggravating their sufferings, and rendering them the less endurable." When put so lucidly, the eventuality of retributive violence comes closer to being understood by the brave and meek alike. To the credit of Punch-Drunk Love, the same sympathy is eventually achieved but in a manner uncharacteristic to the subject of injustice, that of fantasy, and with elements of violence more complicated than tit-for-tat. And while it is an unfortunate truth that more thoughtless expressions of revenge have been lodged on film than could ever be counted much less counterbalanced, Paul Thomas Anderson has offered just such a stark study on the nature of being wronged and moved the balance a bit.

Referring both bizarrely and for the most part inaccurately to his new film as "a dark comedy," the director may be revealing some self-doubt about a somewhat stylistically divergent picture for him. If such trepidation does exist, it is well founded, for after finding in his previous film Magnolia a method so harmonious unto itself, to risk that established language is the greatest risk an artist can take.

Altogether absurd, Punch-Drunk Love is alternately violent and quiet. In the first scene never has a garage door sounded so loud; and who knows what war or spaceship is being given the same decibel level next door. One is reminded of the band Mogwai, whose soft-loud-soft-loud formula -- think Haydn's Surprise Symphony -- is responsible in part for the band's having been touted as the most innovative group working in rock. This comparison to a slightly elite strain of non-Goth pop culture with a taste for white noise can be painted more broadly: it is useful in suggesting a separate mode for Anderson in his new film, rather than the idea that Anderson wants to soften the blow of his change in style for us with the familiar trappings of commercial violence. And, casting Adam Sandler as his lead, Anderson may be amassing curiosities themselves rather than familiars to temper the strange tone of his film.

It is Sandler's (Barry Egan's) garage which was mentioned, and those opening shots frame a violent car accident against a bleak Los Angeles daybreak. The shock the audience experiences from the wreck has an immediate touchstone: just as alarming and unexpected was the loud pelting of frogs that the self-absorbed characters of Magnolia suffered, although polar opposites as chronological plot points (if that designation will be extended to the more tone-setting PDL scene). Interestingly enough, Anderson's penchant for American bluster and blast -- and the crowds they draw -- may have root in his lineage. Although P.T. was born later in California, his late father Ernie still maintains legendary status in Cleveland for his TV role "Ghoulardi," host of a zany B horror movie showcase called "Shock Theater."

After the accident, we, along with Barry, are saddled with a mysterious harmonium, an oppressive gaggle of sisters, and a scandal involving a crooked phone sex operator. Emily Watson weaves in and out with little to work with, playing a love interest named Lena. Her paucity of character becomes troublesome when a few sexually violent lines of dialogue pass between the two and push too insistently for a symbiosis to be understood by the audience. Anderson uses montages of warm colors and overlapping music throughout, the first one looking suspiciously like a palate for titles that was reassigned for its experimental and, again given the break from the normal, manipulative value. Moreover, the absence of credits is all the more conspicuous for a director who has previously turned such sequences into near cries of hosannah.

When our leads fall in love, Shelley Duvall's reprisal of her ode to Popeye, "He Needs Me," comes in. It is an odd choice, but it's tie to another film works within the mild absurdity of the film. Through his love Barry finds in himself a wellspring of indignation, not hatred, and his morals pour out of him in the form of a face-to-face -- or rather nose-to-nose -- meeting with the man at the center of the extortion plot against him. Admirably, Anderson takes on the idea of mercy and supports it well. Strangely enough, at times Punch-Drunk Love's plot resembles that of The Count of Monte Cristo, even down to the way that Barry's patience and resourcefulness affords him a way to take some very important plane flights.

Literary critic Northrop Frye has described the quest-romance, when translated into dreams, as "the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality." "Translated into ritual terms," he says, "the quest-romance is the victory of fertility over the waste land." Anderson's film, as an illustration of the quest-romance, does not succeed as well as it could. After all, the casting of Adam Sandler alone classifies the film as self-conscious -- though Sandler does well. It is difficult to ascertain what the director's intentions were for the film. He commits neither to the absurd nor to the "romantic real" that he usually prefers. Despite singularizing this particular feature, Punch-Drunk Love's hardness works against itself. As a redemptive relationship -- if that is the aim -- Lena's and Barry's fails, and mostly due to a pure lack of feeling.

In many ways, this film is a serious change for the director; there is little of the urgent crosscutting that earmarked his last. In another sense, however, Anderson seems to have picked up precisely where he left off. The final shot of Magnolia is a perfect antidote to the maelstrom-like quality of the movie. It's one long take featuring the coke addict and the bumbling police officer, wherein she, dressed in a clean white shirt, is accepted by him as he sits with her on her bed (his words blurred out by Aimee Mann's "Save Me"), and when she looks straight into camera and smiles, it is truly one of the most redemptive moments in cinema history. And though Lena and Barry may fail to reach that level, their creator seems to wish for them to reside there. In 1983 Peter S. Hawkins wrote a truly insightful book on the methods of Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Iris Murdoch to express transcendence and reach a secularizing audience. The highest praise Paul Thomas Anderson can receive may be that some time in the future he will be included in such a survey.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002