Soundtrack
Punch Drunk Love

Official Site

Punch Drunk Love

Excellence in Film-Making:  Punch-Drunk Love
by Christian De Matteo

HUGE

            I’ve just had one of the most astounding experiences of my life and that experience was watching the diamond that is Punch-Drunk Love.  I will confess, I think P.T. Anderson is one of the best directors working right now, and have thought so since Boogie Nights floored me.  He lost me for two weeks with Magnolia… I thought, until I couldn’t get the film I was convinced had bored the hell out of me, out of my head.  (See my review for my thoughts at the time.)  Magnolia is now one of my all time favorite flicks.  But with Punch-Drunk Love, Anderson ascends another level of filmmaking, creating an overwhelming experience extremely personal to the character and yet still giving you the distance to view the film as the absurdist comedy it is… about as absurd as life.

            I am thoroughly aware of the intensive vagueness of what I’ve just said.  I will attempt now to be more concrete.  Adam Sandler, perfectly cast Barry Egan, a very bizarre man with a great deal of un-dealt with problems:  Rage, depression, social incompetence and fear, and a job where he sells designer toilet plungers.

            He is the victim of a seven sister household where he was degraded, mocked, and derided his entire life.  And he is completely lovable somehow, even when we see him at his weirdest.

            Samantha Watson is one of his sister’s friends who is inexplicably interested in him.  Samantha Watson, who won my heart in Sweet and Lowdown, is perfect.  The “exact opposite,” as her character says, to everything that is Barry.  Forward, confident, calm and socially forward-as-all-get-out.  These two, of course, meet.

            Few directors could have pulled off a balance like this, but that is indeed an unfair criticism since only a mind like Anderson’s could have imagined it in the first place.  The film carries the disturbing beauty and peace of Salvador Dali painting, making you feel calm even as it disturbs you, but eventually leaving you in a happy place somehow, anyway.  Filming in a way that isolation seems a palpable and real landscape, Anderson;s camera is our translator into the world of Barry Egan, explaining in total exactly how it feels to be Mr. Egan. 

            With almost 98% of all other Hollywood films, we would know exactly how this flick was going to roll from this point forth, but not with Paul Thomas Anderson at the helm.  No.  In the midst of breakdowns, outrageous and yet understated slapstick comedy, surreal imagery, absurdity and a seriously horrifying phone sex line fiasco that does indeed threaten the very lives of the characters, the film is so far from Tinsel Town formula that I couldn’t even label this romantic comedy a romantic comedy, since the term has become inexorably connected to the definition of predictable, silly, melodramatic crap.

            Punch-Drunk Love is none of that.  Light as air at times and hysterically funny in all the coolest silly ways and other times so sneakily dark that you don’t even realized you’re chilled, the film gives us a balancing act of perfection and reality in a completely unrealistic world.  Or is it?

The performances, particularly Sandler’s shocking turn, are perfect in the space of the film, and carry Anderson’s idea to completion.  The movie does indeed hang on Sandler completely and he succeeds brilliantly.

            Ultimately, what makes the film buyable and palatable is that even though all the factors being combined frankly shouldn’t work together in anything but a cacophony of failure, the film’s very European, quirky, happy feel makes all the pieces fit together exactly right and make what might have just catapulted, elbowed and stumbled its way into my top ten favorite films.  Maybe.

Critique Section

HugeReviews.com's  Official Rating System:
Pathetic         Wimpy         Solid        Super        HUGE