Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
January 13th, 2007
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia), starring Adam Sandler (The Wedding Singer, Happy Gilmore) and Emily Watson (Angela’s Ashes, Gosford Park).
Imagine an Adam Sandler movie that isn’t funny and doesn’t even try to be. That’s not to say that Sandler plays it straight. His character (Barry) has all the twitches and quirks of Sandler’s usual comic characters, but here they are presented as the characteristics of someone who is mentally ill or autistic.
Given that Barry is assailed by flashes of light and loud sounds which he cannot make sense of, and that he manages to run a marginally successful small business, I think he has Asperger’s syndrome.
The plot is both simple and baroque. Here is the simple version:
Barry, a man in a blue suit, finds a harmonium and learns to play a tune on it. At the same time he meets Lena, a woman in a red dress. They fall in love. The end. (One wonders if they will have purple children.)
But also,
Barry has seven sisters who constantly criticize him, calling him “retard” and “gay boy.” When he is driven too far by their ridicule he smashes his sister’s patio doors with a hammer. He has done this before.
Barry calls an extortionist for phone sex. She sends four blond men from Utah to beat him up and take his money.
Meanwhile Barry hatches a plan to defraud the marketing department of a company offering frequent flyer miles, by purchasing thousands of packages of pudding. He has never been on an airplane.
When Barry and Lena are in bed together she says to him, “I want to bite your cheek and chew on it, it’s so fucking cute.” Barry replies, “I’m looking at your face and I just want to smash it. I just want to fucking smash it with a sledge hammer and squeeze it, you’re so pretty.” Then she says, “I want to chew your face and I want to scoop out your eyes and I want to eat them.”
“Ok,” he says. “This is funny. This is nice.”
“Ok,” we say. “This isn’t funny. This isn’t nice.”
This movie doesn’t really work for me, but I think it is well worth seeing, and if you can stand it at all I think you will want to watch it again. It’s a strong but failed effort.
It is extremely well directed. Many shots are gorgeous set-pieces, such as the silhouette hug in Hawaii, shown on the DVD case (above).
There is a consistent colour scheme. Barry always wears a blue suit and his colour is blue. Lena always wears a red dress and her colour is red. White is used for transitions from one to the other. Sometimes the white takes the form of a fog-like mist, and it is likely to be streaked with colour flares from the camera lens.
I don’t know what the colours mean, except that they are both strong primaries, as if to suggest that these characters have no soft edges; they are not blended with anything, but are only themselves. They have no nuances. The misty white suggests a dream state, and I think it is possible that Lena only exists in Barry’s mind, although I’m not sure about that. (Yellow, the third primary colour, is quite absent. Although I haven’t checked, I have a feeling there may not be a single yellow object in this film, other than the blondes from Utah.)
In the opening scene Barry ventures to the roadside carrying a cup of coffee. It is the first day he has worn his new blue suit. He hears a loud bang and a car comes catapulting down the street.
Then a taxi deposits a harmonium at the end of Barry’s driveway and the woman in red appears.
What’s going on? The director has been quoted as saying that the loud bang and the rolling car are simply to get Barry’s (and our) attention, and that the harmonium represents the fact that Barry needs to find harmony in his life. Is this a skilled director or one who is hopelessly naive?
Watch it and see for yourself.
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