Punch Drunk Love

Review: A+

This film is being sold in trail­ers as show­ing a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent Adam San­dler… I believe Roger Ebert said that he couldn’t look at an Adam San­dler movie the same way after this.

Well, I don’t think it’s a totally new char­ac­ter for San­dler, but I agree that Punch Drunk Love both refines and expands on the funny nice-​guy he’s played in the past, while offer­ing a new tar­nished dimension.

Sandler’s char­ac­ter, Barry Egan, is a shy, slightly obsessive-​compulsive, easily-​spooked busi­ness owner, with 7 annoy­ing passive-​aggressive sis­ters who con­stantly pepper him with insults and drive him to vio­lent “freak-outs”, we are told, since child­hood. He’s def­i­nitely got avoidant issues.

Anyway, Barry sells whole­sale bath­room sup­plies out of a ware­house in the Valley east of Los Ange­les, and spends a lot of his time think­ing about how to turn Healthy Choice pud­ding into thou­sands of frequent-​flier miles. Stay with me! It’s odd, yes…

As the story con­tin­ues, one of the sis­ters intro­duces Barry to a friend of hers, played by Emily Watson, and a very strange romance ensues.

I’m not go any­more into the plot or story, so if you’re inclined to learn more, check out A.O Scott’s review in the Times.

What I’m inter­ested is this thrown-​about idea that this is a totally new Adam San­dler – I don’t think it is. Barry’s life, from the begin­ning, is one of strange unease. San­dler is quite good at com­mu­ni­cat­ing the dread of social and pro­fes­sional rela­tion­ships in Barry’s life, and that feel­ing is under­scored by a creep­ing cin­e­matog­ra­phy and beau­ti­fully dis­ori­ent­ing sound design. You get the sense that his co-​workers don’t know quite what to make of him, and his sis­ters and brother-in-laws are fre­quently vio­lat­ing his pri­vacy, dig­nity and confidence.

Again and again, Barry is pushed so far that he schiz­o­phreni­cally explodes from his usual shy with­drawal, to vio­lent out­bursts – just the kind of bipo­lar out­bursts that San­dler employed in his less-than-intelligent out­ings (Billy Madi­son, Happy Gilmore, the Wed­ding Singer… kind of inter­change­able, no?).

Punch Drunk Love’s hero is the same kind of lik­able nice-​guy the girls can feel good about, yet the slap­stick vio­lence usu­ally found in his movies is far more psy­chi­cally charged here, and in the end I’m not left won­der­ing Isn’t Adam San­dler an odd choice for that role?… he’s perfect.

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Emily Watson plays Lena, the adorable woman who, for some unknown reason, falls in love with Barry. Lena is inter­est­ing as well, because she too vac­il­lates in a slight schiz­o­phrenic manner from a shy sweet­heart, into a woman who aggres­sively goes after the man she wants. Unfor­tu­nately, she is one of the less devel­oped char­ac­ters – I really don’t under­stand why she wanted to meet Barry in the first place. Lone­li­ness? But Watson is amaz­ing on screen.

There is a tor­tured and sen­ti­men­tal nature to Barry, but San­dler and P.T. Ander­son never make it seem con­trived or false – have you seen Robin Williams or Chris Rock in dra­matic roles? I mean, seriously.

Simply put, this is a very good film.