PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE, Paul Thomas Anderson (2002) / His triumphant anti-rom-com

NOTE TO FIRST-TIMERS: This event is not a screening of the film. This event is our regular Saturday night group Zoom conversation on the film, after you've streamed or rented and watched it on your own during the week. Check out the HOW THIS WORKS section below. We look forward to having you join us!

ABOUT THE FILM
Although susceptible to violent outbursts, bathroom supply business owner Barry Egan is a timid and shy man by disposition, leading a lonely, uneventful life -- partly due to the constant berating he suffers from his seven sisters. However, several events transpire that shake up Egan's mundane existence, one of which is falling in love with one sister's co-worker, Lena Leonard. The budding romance is threatened though when Barry, idly dialing in to a phone sex service, falls victim to extortion, calling for extreme measures.

Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Produced by JoAnne Sellar, Daniel Lupi, and Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán
Cinematography: Robert Elswit
Edited by Leslie Jones
Music by Jon Brion
Release date: 19 May 2002 (Cannes), 1 November 2002 (United States)
Running time: 1h 35m

HOW THIS WORKS
Rent or stream Punch-Drunk Love and view it during the week. (Find out where to do that at JustWatch.com and TV.Movie; it's available for free on Kanopy and Hoopla.) Give us your RSVP, then join our conversation this Saturday 4/18 at 7:20p. Once you reply, a Zoom link will appear on the upper right of this page. First-timers must RSVP by Friday 4/17 in order to attend.

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Once Paul Thomas Anderson, arguably our best and most significant contemporary director, scored long overdue recognition with Best Director and Best Picture Oscars this spring, we decided to add ours in turn. It only seemed fitting that, mimicking Anderson's maverick ways, we would go against the grain with a surprise choice. Punch-Drunk Love is seldom cited as top-flight PTA, yet its antic absurdity reflects the breathlessness of his comic style whenever he enters that mode. The tale of Barry and Lena expresses something quintessential about Anderson's vision, making it well worth our conversation – and, at 95 minutes in length, it relieves us of the long-distance attention span other PTA works require!

Barry Egan's life endures a constant driving sleet of anxiety-producing conditions and events. He resembles nothing so much as a lone bull in a barren pasture, hemmed in and paralyzed by fate and the fences of his own neuroses. Both he and Lena, when they do initiate, seem more acted upon than acting – such are the loose ends in their plans and the bizarre contingencies in their environment, harmonium and mattress store and shelf-stable pudding and all, Anderson plays on our sympathies, our experiences of ourselves at our most vulnerable in a world at its most alien. When this unaccountable love persists then ("I have a love in my life. It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine," as Barry tells his tormentor) it's all quite as disorienting as it is comforting. Whatever liberating joy we feel can never escape our sense of being adrift in a universe beyond reason: we can only go along for the ride. For we who've stumbled after Lena and Barry on their path to romance though, there's the deliciousness of knowing such connections might still be ours, as long as we keep clipping coupons from the packaging of life.

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TRAILER, RATINGS, EXTRAS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGqn5k227HY

Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer: 79% of 202 reviews
Metacritic: 78 (generally favorable) based on 37 reviews

Punch-Drunk Love was entered into competition for the Palme d'Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, where Paul Thomas Anderson was named Best Director.

Following the successes of his near-epic-length previous efforts, Boogie Nights and Magnolia, Anderson set himself the challenge of working within genre constraints, specifically the 90-minute rom-com. Adam Sandler in particular attracted Anderson; Sandler's conventional antics seldom failed to crack him up, yet he saw in Sandler a bereftness that could be drawn upon for something deeper. Anderson calls Punch-Drunk Love “an art house Adam Sandler film.”

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BLURBS & ATTITUDES
Through this miasma of pain and suffering, love may not flicker more strongly than a dim lamp. But it's the only beacon to consider. Can Barry find his? Thanks to Anderson's assured picture, a symphony of cinematic textures, that disarmingly simple question becomes incredibly compelling. ∞ Desson Thomson, Washington Post

With its feverish, percussive soundtrack and bravura cinematography, Punch-Drunk Love is like a bolt from the blue, chock-full of unexpected delight. ∞ Stephen Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer

Anderson delivers a satisfyingly quirky, cinematically masterful valentine that contains more seeds of truth about the human heart than a hundred big fat Greek comedies. ∞ Shawn Levy, Portland Oregonian

This aside, its best creative coup is Sandler's presence in the leading role. Anderson has detected qualities below the surface of his usual screen persona – a wounded insecurity, a sense of repression that's almost violent – that no director has called upon before, and they're exactly right for this peculiar little gem of a movie. ∞ David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor

Punch-Drunk Love is one dark, strange-tasting sorbet, its sweetness shot through with startling, unexpected flavors. It's a romantic comedy on the verge of a nervous breakdown. ∞ David Ansen, Newsweek

The film is exhilarating to watch because Sandler, liberated from the constraints of formula, reveals unexpected depths as an actor. He has darkness, obsession and power. His world is hedged around with mystery and challenge. Consider an opening scene, when he is at work hours before the others have arrived, and sees a harmonium dumped in the street in front of his office. It is at once the most innocent and ominous of objects; he runs from it and then peeks around a corner to see if it is still there ... Given a director and a screenplay that sees through the Sandler persona, that understands it as the disguise of a suffering outsider, Sandler reveals depths and tones we may have suspected but couldn’t bring into focus. ∞ Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

It works because of Anderson's ability to challenge viewer expectations. Instead of making his principal actors change, he manipulates the story and dialogue to match their characters. His exquisite art-house camera shots and sense of pacing set Sandler up to do his usual thing in an almost poetic manner. ∞ Darrin Keene, Film Threat

Ms. Watson, her blue eyes nearly as wide as the screen, has a smart, quiet oddness that plays beautifully off Mr. Sandler's somersaulting bipolarity. Lena may be a romantic convention rather than a fully conceived personality, but she is also the audience's surrogate: her love for Barry is the cue for our own, and Ms. Watson (who some of us are half in love with already) brings us to him in the palm of her hand.

''I have a love in my life,'' Barry declares in his final showdown with phone-sex impresario Dean, ''and it gives me more strength than you could ever understand.'' The line gets a laugh, but it is not a joke: the laughter is a response to the grand pop-culture idealism that the movie presents without irony or apology. It might have been interesting if Mr. Sandler had departed from his usual doofus man-child persona, but what he does within that persona -- infusing it with a vulnerable, off-kilter humanity that recalls such great film comedians as Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati -- turns out to be even better. He has often used the possibility of violence that accompanies his charm to crude, bullying effect, most recently in the horrendous Mr. Deeds. But here, because the spectacle of Barry's cowardice is so excruciating, and the injustices and annoyances he suffers so stressful, Mr. Sandler's fury comes close to poetry.

And poetry is perhaps the best way to think about Mr. Anderson's suave, exuberant balance of free-form inspiration and formal control. In this, his fourth feature, he is still very much a movie-mad adolescent, sprinkling his work with gleeful allusions and playful rip-offs of whatever strikes his fancy.
But even as it calls to mind everything from Freed Unit MGM musicals to The Searchers, Punch-Drunk Love goes far beyond pastiche. What Mr. Anderson wants to do is recapture, without nostalgia, the giddiness and sweep of old movies, and his mastery of the emotional machinery of the medium is breathtaking. You can feel his impulsive pleasure as he flings the camera through long tracking shots, and layers his nimble visual compositions with music. The score, by John Brion, is alternately swooning and percussive, and it is as important an element as Mr. Sandler's performance (or the bright blue suit Barry wears in nearly every scene). Many of the scenes are structured like musical numbers, building up into a swirl of sound and spectacle that leaves you addled, a little dizzy and overcome by a pleasing, unplaceable sensation -- one best summed up in the movie's title. ∞ A.O. Scott, New York Times