This is one of my favorite recent movies. It is Paul Thomas Anderson's fourth work, and it shows his unique genius as much as his others, without reiterating his prior achievements. yossarian says that it's not Magnolia or Boogie Nights, and that's true - in place of three-hour epics featuring enormous casts, we have a short, tightly focused examination of a very improbable romance.
Punch-Drunk Love doesn't duplicate Anderson's successful earlier works, but it certainly shows his unique style. Most obvious is the expressive cinematography (for which Anderson receives far too little attention). The film works heavily with color, creating a starkness out of vivid primary colors. As the film opens, Adam Sandler is seen in a bright blue suit, seemingly lost in the blue and white wall behind him. An early scene has Sandler looking into a grocery store freezer case, containing a sea of green Healthy Choice frozen dinners, again against a white backdrop. Later Sandler is seen running through an apartment building, its walls unrelentingly white. The impression throughout the beginning of a movie is of Sandler's character Barry lost, isolated in an eerie sort of unreality.
Anderson has a fascination with coincidence. His films feature confluences of unlikely or impossible events - this, in fact, is the basis for Magnolia, which culminates with a literally Biblical event - a storm of frogs, falling across a city and drawing all the characters together and leading to the collective denouement of its parallel storylines. In Punch-Drunk Love, Barry is the recipient of a harmonium, abandoned on the side of the road, and he uses it to punctuate the events of the picture. But Barry, already in the midst of an utterly surreal life, selling novelty Fungers - toilet plungers with cartoon characters and gold dice on their handles - seems to be surrounded with absurdity, as though trapped in a dream. He spends hundreds of dollars on pudding to accumulate frequent flier miles, but he's never been in an airplane.
The arrival of Emily Watson's character Lena compounds the unlikeliness of Barry's life. She arrives at his warehouse one day, and gives him the keys to her car so that he can give them to the mechanic next door when his shop opens. Later she reveals that she did this deliberately. She had seen a photo of Barry and had already begun to fall in love with him. But as the two characters draw together, Barry is pulled a little bit closer to earth. Suddenly the backdrops begin to look like real places - a restaurant, city streets, and a beach in Hawaii. The starkness of the movie diminishes. Lena wears red throughout the film, except when we first meet her, dressed in pink, and in Hawaii, where she wears white. Her appearance in Barry's life brings warmth, passion, and love to Barry, and in what is perhaps the oldest archetype in storytelling, this love is what saves Barry.
Barry has spent his entire life as a victim. First, he is the target of his seven emasculating sisters' meanness and abuse, and then he is simply the victim of circumstance, leading an empty, lonely life. Finally he becomes the victim of a phone sex scam, perpetrated by 'Georgia' on behalf of Dean, played by the ever-brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman. The most symbolic point in the movie, and the emotional climax, occurs when Barry drives to Utah to confront them, and Dean backs down. "I have a love in my life, and that makes me stronger than anything," he proclaims, and in this act reclaims his life and exits the dark unreality that surrounded him.
The loving, accepting, and odd character of Lena, and the damaged, sometimes childish Barry are perhaps unlikely leads in a romance. In the steamiest scene in the movie, they exchange lines like "I want to smash you in the face with a sledgehammer" and "I want to suck out your eyeball and chew on it". But it's still a romance, albeit both dark and intellectual, and it reworks the ancient theme of love as a force of redemption. This is probably the best film of Sandler's career (I say probably because I rarely see his others) and even if his performance was familiar, his usual fragile pathos worked on a deeper level then anything else he's done.
Paul Thomas Anderson is an immensely gifted director, and it's no surprise that Anderson has taken a rather mediocre actor and allowed him the chance to achieve something greater than he ever has before. Anderson has said before that he is a fan of Sandler's movies, and it's obvious that he saw some untapped capability in Sandler. Anderson's direction has crafted a beautiful, dark, fascinating movie, and he has shown himself capable of wonderful cinematic achievement and masterful storytelling, whether his focus is epic or narrow.