Punch-Drunk Love

Paul Thomas Anderson knows how to make an asset pay off: by setting the box office ablaze. In 2002, investing in Adam Sandler meant printing money in the nine-figure range and waiting to rake in the box office receipts. Sandler was at the peak of his game: a comedian without the fine motricity of a Jim Carrey, but with all the rough motricity of slapstick, naturally prone to flatulence, silly voices, and locker-room humor. Anderson had him at his disposal, the affable Sunday-afternoon goofball, the older cousin everyone loves, and he shrugged. He didn’t get rid of that Sandler entirely: he wound him up and locked him in a box. He let him spin and bang against the walls, bruised but immovable, until he was nothing but a bruise without God or reason.

Anguish, anxiety. Are we in the presence of a film which is cruel to the viewer? What, then, to say of Uncut Gems (2019, Josh and Benny Safdie), an even more relentless specimen of the pressure-cooker cinema that Sandler calls a pastime? Punch-Drunk Love is only cruel to the Sandler of that era. Anderson, a cinematic Pavlov, provokes him with the bell of the caricature; he even breaks a toilet brush. He demands strength from him and provokes fits of rage, as in Happy Gilmore (1996) and The Waterboy (1998), but, unlike those films, he grants him no triumph or redemption of character. Anderson, a Yosemite Sam screenwriter, shooting at Sandler’s feet, the Bugs Bunny forced to dance amid the gunfire.

If, in his 1990s comedies, Sandler played what critic Bilge Ebiri calls “expressionist variations on the stylized idiot,” the transformation in Punch-Drunk Love is completely absurd. It’s cryptic and stunted. He’s the average protagonist—a hot-tempered loser, lost within himself—of a Roberto Bolaño short story. And Anderson even has the audacity to ask his character, Barry, to be the very inventor of his own reward: a deus ex machina by design, so contrived that it disqualifies itself from the Latin expression. That is, unless we simply accept that the machine is love, disjointed and insistent in its fluttering.

Drunk with Love, as the title of the Portuguese release aptly puts it, even if it loses the meaning of the original: a reference to punch-drunk syndrome, “boxer’s dementia,” caused by repeated blows to the head. Love as a head injury: a beautiful image, no doubt, but it doesn’t explain all of Barry’s sudden fury for living. In the very first scene of Punch-Drunk Love, he’s already wearing an odd blue suit—a bright color, one or two sizes too big—to the general (and ongoing) bewilderment of his colleagues and family. Also at the beginning of the film, a harmonica (never heard on Jon Brion’s soundtrack) is left at his door; perhaps this is the real catalyst. For whatever reason, he is changing—a process already underway. He admits he doesn’t know why, yet he doesn’t suppress the impulse.

When he meets Lena, played by Emily Watson—masterful in her ability to soften a total intrusion—Adam Sandler’s Barry shuts himself off completely (prudent!). When a call to a sex line—innocuous, sexless, a gesture against loneliness—turns out to be an extortion attempt, something unlocks in the character. Something overrides what would be his best protective instinct, as if he understood that, in the vagaries of love, no origins are more valid than others. Nor are there any individuals more suited for romance. Lena and Barry spin on the “carousel of weirdos,” as dubbed by Clã, with a latent and unsettling chemistry. In bed, Barry says he wants to smash Lena’s face; she, in turn, confesses she wants to gouge his eyes out with a spoon.

Watson and Sandler embody a sense of being out of place in life—both individually and as a couple—and show that this doesn’t have to be disempowering. Robert Elswit, the cinematographer, gives them a special touch: after being kicked out of a restaurant, they head for their car and are captured in shades of blue; an impromptu One from the Heart shot against the backdrop of a car dealership. It is assumed that Barry will pay dearly for all this, in the climax with Dean Trumbell, the mattress salesman and mastermind of the scam. Philip Seymour Hoffman took on this crazy character, a regular in Anderson’s films, who has just snapped—just as Alfred Molina did in Boogie Nights or as Bradley Cooper would later do in Licorice Pizza. Near the end, he shakes the landline phone, and there’s a touch of horror in it: we can’t tell if he’s doing it to stretch the cord or to practice a punch.

It speaks volumes about Adam Sandler’s strength that, in this showdown, his line is the most chilling: “I have a love in my life. It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine.” That love, that very one: even though it was abandoned on his doorstep, even though the color was garish, even though it was a size or two too big.