Day 39: You Can Go Places In The World With Pudding. That's Funny.

PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE (2002)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzman

Let's say you wanted to make a romantic comedy.  How would you go about it?  Well, if you were to follow the standard formula, you'd take one socially maladjusted man and team him up with a lively and vivacious woman and bingo!  Well, technically, that's what we have in Punch-Drunk Love.  But what sets this film apart from the others is style and substance - two things sorely lacking in most rom-coms.

A synopsis of the plot would be a little hard to do.  The long and short of it is, Barry Egan (Sandler) leads a very lonely life.  He sells novelty plungers (which he calls "fungers"), collects Healthy Choice food products (particularly pudding, since it's the cheapest) to redeem frequent-flier miles and flies into fits of rage when his family ridicules him.  One day, he witnesses a car crash outside his office and finds an abandoned harmonium left on the side of the road, so he brings it inside.  He calls a phone-sex line, but can't get into it.  The girl on the other end calls him back and demands money, at first as a pest but she soon becomes a genuine threat, as her boss (Hoffman) sends a gang of brothers to "collect."  Meanwhile, Barry's sister introduces him to her friend Lena Leonard (Watson).  He forms an almost instantaneous bond with her.  Soon, she flies off to Hawaii for business, and Barry follows her.  They fall in love (for no particular reason), but when the "collectors" come for Barry, they smash his car, injuring Lena.  While she's in the hospital, Barry drives from Los Angeles to Provo, Utah to confront the man behind the extortion attempts.  When he gets back, he promises Lena to redeem those frequent-flier miles so they can go wherever they want.

Now, I'm sure you're scratching your head right about now.  But the thing about Punch-Drunk Love is that this film is all about the art of filmmaking.  It's not really about the plot.  It's not even really about the characters.  It's about taking a bunch of things that seemingly make no sense and, through the art of movie making, making them make sense.  This can be dangerous.  If you try to force things to make sense, you're in trouble, but Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the few directors working today who has absolute command of the medium.  And he makes no excuses for making and "arthouse film."  That's precisely what he was going for.  And instead of being pretentious or off-putting, he creates a film that, while not for all tastes, is one of the better examples of what it is to make real, true cinema.

It's also very interesting to see Adam Sandler out of his usual frat-house element.  Instead of going strictly for laughs, he underplays the role of Barry to the point where everything he says is almost a whisper.  That is, except when he's blind with rage and smashing everything in sight.  Emily Watson is also very sweet as the mysterious Lena.  We don't know much about her, and we really don't learn much as the film progresses.  She just is who she is, which is what Barry likes about her. 

I've said many times how much I despise romantic comedies.  So when one comes along that sets the entire genre on its head, I tend to like it a bit more.  But the genre-bending element isn't the only thing I loved about this movie.  It's an amazingly artistic film.  And more than that, I love any movie where some miserable bastard finds someone to love and that loves them back.  It sort of gives me hope.