Film
Punch-Drunk Love
- Director
- Paul Thomas Anderson
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 95 mins
The best romantic comedy ever made? Could be. It’s certainly the most subversive. And, indeed, the only one where you’ll find unlikely leading man Adam Sandler staring into the eyes of his even-more-unlikely love interest Emily Watson and remarking: “I’m looking at your face and I just want to smash it with a sledgehammer, you’re so pretty.” One of the many great pleasures of Paul Thomas Anderson’s atypically concise, strikingly surreal romcom is the way it scratches away at the surface of Sandler’s familiar blank-faced everymoron persona to get at the sadness, frustration, anger and pent-up violence beneath.
Punch-Drunk Love is also a superbly controlled piece of film-making. It boasts beautiful interludes, where its lovers are bathed in warm light, the score swells with rich orchestration, and romantic dialogue is exchanged without a hint of parody or a knowing wink to the audience. At the same time, it is virtually an anti-romcom, indulging Anderson’s fascination with coincidence and odd couplings and straying so far from generic formula that you never have the faintest idea what’s going to happen next.
Barry Egan (Sandler) is a bland, uptight novelty bathroom supplies salesman who wears an electric blue suit, collects supermarket puddings to cash in on a frequent-flyer promotion, and is teased relentlessly by his seven domineering sisters. Lena Leonard (Watson) is a business executive who falls inexplicably for Barry after seeing a photograph of him. Alas, Barry is being pursued by a quartet of henchpersons sent by malevolent, blackmailing Utah phone sex company boss Philip Seymour Hoffman.
From its mostly loud and discordant score to the wealth of incidental detail, this is both entrancing and unsettling. Watson’s luminous performance hints at greater knowledge of Barry’s torment than she discloses, while Sandler exhibits a hitherto unimaginable range, his character veering from sudden violent explosions to extraordinary moments of despair, such as the heartbreaking scene where he confides in a man he believes to be a doctor: “I don’t like myself very much. Can you help me?”
It’s back on screen in the ‘shed Paul Thomas Anderson on 35mm February brunch season to complement the release of Phantom Thread.
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