“I don’t like myself sometimes. Can you help me?”
It’s jarring to hear this statement from the mouth of Adam Sandler. It indicates a self-awareness hardly characteristic of the clown prince of the stupid male comedy. Audiences have come to expect violence and profanity but not sensitive pleading. That is what they get, however, in director Paul Thomas Anderson’s new Punch-Drunk Love? Sandler acting for good instead of evil.
Anderson wrote this film specifically for Sandler, the one person he believed could infuse the lead character with the inwardness and anxiousness it demanded. As Barry Egan, a man subdued into submission by his seven overbearing sisters, Sandler gives us a role full of nervous energy. When Egan is not selling toilet plungers, he is trying to capitalize on a marketing error that will allow him to swap pudding for millions of frequent-flyer miles. His is a murderously boring existence soon interrupted by an absurd car crash, an orphaned harmonium, an extortionist phone sex operator and his ascent into love.
Sandler’s relentless drive towards mediocrity may have numbed audiences to the possibility of interpreting his typical role as an honest portrayal. This is what Sandler has peddled for years?the repression of emotion channeled into random outbursts of violence. Instead of beating the hell out of Bob Barker, though, he destroys a restaurant bathroom, the result of a thoughtful frustration with himself that is incommunicable in any other way. But while Anderson may have matched Sandler’s dumb guy persona to a script that serves his temperament with purpose, he cannot completely remove years of solidified posturing. The violence, the shiftiness and the mumbling of Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore are still present in Barry Egan.
Lena Leonard (Emily Watson) is the mysterious woman that woos Barry’s self-loathing introvert. Her character has no history and we never learn where she is from or what she does, but those things are not important. All that matters is the romantic magic that she works on both him and the audience. Watson is all blue wide-eyes, enormous smiles and charming Englishness. It is not very clear why she would fall for Barry, but in the vacuumed-sealed idiosyncratic world of Punch-Drunk Love, it works. She is able to melt his defenses in ways both direct and coy as she tempers her naturally innocent persona with a strong and confident erotic energy.
Barry and Lena are two people aching to connect?a need central to Anderson’s work. Boogie Nights was about porn, but it was more importantly concerned with the search for a surrogate family. Strip Magnolia of its amphibious designs and reveal a cast of characters wanting to move towards each other but not able to take the first step. Those intentions are brought to fruition in Punch-Drunk Love. In a world full of insecurity and misunderstanding, Anderson sees nothing riskier or more necessary than the revelation that love allows. In this sense, the film is unabashedly sincere in its portrayal of the total abandon of an awkward romance. Watch as Barry and Lena run towards each other in the hallway of a Hawaiian hotel. She hops up a flight of steps, skirt swaying in the wind, arms swinging and childlike, face expectant and aglow while he shuffles nervously, simultaneously elated and scared witless. The camera cuts to their profiles in silhouette as they stumble in their eagerness to kiss, and the sudience smiles. It is a magical scene and the most joyous point of the film, suffused with a clumsiness characteristic of love’s initial stages.
Punch-Drunk Love is at points off-putting, unbelievable and baffling. Many will walk out of the theater confused and uncertain. This is the bewilderment that follows the experience of something original and daring. Amazingly, Anderson takes Sandler out of typecasting hell, manipulates his shtick and produces a defense for love in our estranged society. When Sandler, having finally found the strength to speak up for himself, says, “I have a love in my life that is stronger than you can imagine,” it is difficult to fight the urge to apply ironic sentiments to such a corny statement. But against our hardened natures, we believe Adam Sandler, which is the most amazing thing of all.
