director/screenwriter
Paul Thomas Anderson
producers
Paul Thomas Anderson
Daniel Lupi
Joanne Sellar
cinematographer
Robert Elswit
music
Jon Brion
editor
Leslie Jones
cast
Adam Sandler (Barry Egan)
Emily Watson (Lena Leonard)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (Dean Trumbell)
Luis Guzmán (Lance)
Mary Lynn Rajskub (Elizabeth)
Hazel Mailloux (Rhonda)
Ashley Clark (Georgia)
Robert Smigel (Walter the Dentist)
Julie Hermelin (Kathleen)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 97m
u.s.
release: October 11,
2002
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other paul
thomas anderson films
reviewed on this website:
- boogie
nights
- magnolia
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In Punch-Drunk Love,
writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie
Nights, Magnolia)
uses Adam Sandler as a sort of found object of pathos and hostility.
As Barry Egan, a sad sack running a threadbare California business,
Sandler shrinks from people like an amoeba recoiling from a drop
of cold water. Barry is also given to apocalyptic bursts of rage,
which we can trace back to his seven sisters and their cavalierly
sadistic, meant-to-be-loving treatment of him. The movie is devoted
to Barry's mercurial moods -- yearning and loathing combined
in a passive-aggressive ball -- and some of the result is dazzling,
and alive in a way few other movies this year have been or will
be. Yet for all that, I couldn't wait for it to be over.
Anderson's 188-minute Magnolia
tested the patience (and bladders) of many who endured it; this
time, the eager young maestro has set himself a 97-minute
ceiling. But it's clear by now that whatever characterization
skill Anderson showed in his lean, mean debut, 1997's Hard
Eight, was a fluke. Barry is no more or less than his resentment
and need -- the latter underscored by Anderson's frequent use
of "He Needs Me," sung by Shelley Duvall's Olive Oyl
in Robert Altman's Popeye. Okay, we get it: if Hard
Eight was Anderson's riff on Altman's California Split,
Boogie Nights was his Nashville, and Magnolia
was his Short Cuts, the new film, with its lunkheaded
hero and his tremulous lady love, familial tension, and obsession
with a food product (in Barry's case, pudding he buys by the
gross to get frequent-flyer miles), must be Anderson's Popeye.
Would this filmmaker have anything to say had Robert Altman
never been born?
Barry falls in love with Lena
Leonard (Emily Watson), who does some sort of work alongside
one of Barry's meddling sisters, and who wanted to meet him based
on having seen a family photo of him with his dread siblings.
What does she see in him? He offers nothing except need. But
need isn't love, or vice versa, and the desire to be needed is
also not love. There is no evidence that these two specific people
belong together, and Emily Watson, in the latest in a string
of drastically underwritten roles, isn't given the material to
make us see why Barry would be special to her. We understand
why she's special to him -- she's attractive, and
shows attraction towards him -- but this match seems awfully
one-sided. There isn't even a scene in which Lena is charmed
by one of Barry's personality quirks.
As usual, Anderson shovels
in details he thinks are cool, whether or not they belong in
the movie. A subplot in which Barry gets ripped off by a phone-sex
operator is exceedingly tiresome, though it gives Anderson a
reason to put Philip Seymour Hoffman (as the scuzzy boss behind
the phone-sex scam operation -- the film's Bluto, if you will)
in the film, and it activates Barry's rage gratifyingly a couple
of times. It should be said that the half-serious Oscar buzz
about Sandler shouldn't even be half-serious; he does nothing
here he hasn't done before, even in his quiet, somber moments
when he lets his voice go limp and passive. He gave a more fully-rounded
performance in The Wedding Singer, where he not only had
a basic, solid script to work from but better dialogue and room
to be funny; then again, The Wedding Singer wasn't directed
by Paul Thomas Anderson the Critics' Darling.
Anderson has said he wanted
to make an Adam Sandler movie, but Punch-Drunk Love is
no more an Adam Sandler movie than The
Spanish Prisoner -- which used its journeyman comedian
to similar dissonant effect -- was a Steve Martin movie. It is,
as the ads say, "a P.T. Anderson Picture." As always,
Anderson does things no one else is doing (that's not to say
no one else has ever done them), and his ardor and enthusiasm
keep you watching. But what he puts onscreen is increasingly
unengaging. Anderson is obviously in punch-drunk love with making
movies; he has also just as obviously forgotten -- other than
for his own pleasure -- why, exactly, he makes them.
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