Rating- * * * * * (5/5)
One of my favorite things about following movies as closely as I do is that I get the opportunity to see great directors rising up through the ranks. Most directors fade away into obscurity but the great ones develop a feel and style all their own. Paul Thomas Anderson is one of those directors. Logic would lead one to believe that it’s only after many years of experience that one could achieve greatness in their field, but with directing it seems just the opposite. Many of the great directors had it from the get-go and achieved their greatness with their first film: Orson Welles’ first film Citizen Kane is considered the greatest film ever made; Stephen Spielberg rose from obscurity with Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind; and, more recently, directors like Sam Mendes and M. Night Shyamalan got Oscar nods for their first films. Anderson comes from the same “boy-genius” instant success background as so many other great directors and continues to produce amazing work with each new film. Anderson gained immediate attention from his first film Boogie Nights, an almost epic story about the rise and fall of a porn star during the advent of home video in the 1970s. From the beginning, critics noticed Anderson’s knack for meticulous detail and his superb direction of a rather large and eclectic cast (Anderson has been compared to another director famous for large casts, the great Robert Altman). Anderson followed up with Magnolia, one of my favorite movies of the ‘90s, which used an amazing, all-star cast to tell a twisting and turning story about love, death, redemption and coincidence during one long day in the San Fernando Valley. I instantly fell in love with P.T. Anderson after seeing his fantastically creative camerawork and storytelling styles in Magnolia and anxiously awaited his next brilliant work. Imagine my surprise when I heard that his next movie would star Adam Sandler. “You’ve got to be kidding me?” I thought. “What could a guy like this possibly want with the man who brought us Mr. Deeds?” I was not the only skeptical one about this by any means but after hearing Anderson’s explanation I began to understand. Anderson believes there is a kernel of beauty to the character’s that Sandler plays in his movies; they are generally nice guys that get pushed around and put into bad situations and sometimes they just snap and go into violent fits of rage. The character intrigued Anderson so much that he decided to make a movie on it. Much to my surprise, Anderson was able to craft a thoughtful, moving, and at times, beautiful film about this character and gave Adam Sandler what is undoubtedly the performance of his career. As with all of Anderson’s films, the plot moves at a very slow, meandering pace that allows us the characters to develop as much as possible before they are thrown into a mess. The movie follows Barry Egan, a moderately wealthy businessman (we are never really sure what it is exactly that Barry does) who has seven very abusive sisters and major problems with talking to women. Barry is always the nicest guy at the party but when his sisters give him constant abuse about how shy he is or how thoughtless he is for not accepting a blind date from one of his sisters, he just can’t be nice anymore. He stops mid-sentence to bust the three glass doors at his sister’s house and without any explanation returns to the normal quiet Barry that he was before. Anderson allows for subtleties to reveal the character’s quirks and insecurities rather than narrate them or spell them all out for you. He also has a knack for symbolism like no one else out there today. Watching his progress, I also noticed that he’s developing a sense of cinematic economy that he clearly lacked in his earlier work. What I mean is, he is getting a better sense of how to say more with fewer words and fewer shots. Anderson is able to say as much in the hour-and-a-half running time of Punch-Drunk Love as he did in the three-hours-plus running time of Magnolia. That is a sign of progress and in a director that is already good, it means that greatness is ahead. Punch-Drunk Love is one of the most unusual and original films of the year. It is also one of the best; I highly recommend it.