The SmarK DVD Rant for Punch-Drunk Love
“I’m sitting here looking at your face, and I just want to smash it in.”
– Barry Egan sweet-talks Lena.
As many people may or may not know about me, I’m a diehard PT Anderson junkie and fanboy, and proud of it. Boogie Nights ranks in my all-time favorite movies, and I sat through Magnolia in the theaters, TWICE. Sadly Hard Eight remains ridiculously priced in most retail stores and I’ve never bought the DVD, but I’ve seen the movie multiple times on the movie channels. So basically I think PT is f*cking great and can do no wrong, and thus if you’re looking for an objective look at his work, seek another review.
On the other hand, if there’s two sub-genres of mainstream moviemaking that I detest more than any other, it’s Adam Sandler Movies and Romantic Comedies. While there used to be a time when I enjoyed Adam Sandler’s self-deprecating humor on SNL, once he became the $25 million per movie leading man (still doing self-deprecating humor) he lost the appeal with me. So when I heard that PT Anderson’s next movie would be a romantic comedy starring Adam Sandler well, my ears certainly perked up, and not necessarily in a good way. But what was the final result?
The Film
The thing I hate about romantic comedies in general is that the people involved don’t act like real people or talk like real people — they’re plastic Beautiful People who act like people in romantic comedies and talk like people with words carefully scripted to appeal to the widest range of audience, mostly women. True sci-fi isn’t Star Trek, it’s the premise that Julia Roberts and Ben Affleck have trouble finding a date. Anyway, generally two people have a Meet Cute, some obvious twist is thrown in between them to prevent them from getting together when it’s blatantly obvious they will get together if they stopped for five seconds to ask the obvious questions, one of them comes up with a ridiculous story to cover why he or she lied about something silly they did, and after the girl leaves and the audience thinks it’ll never happen, they get back together at the last minute, the end. If it’s done well (ironically enough, in a movie like The Wedding Singer with Adam Sandler), then you can overlook the inherent stupidity of the people involved. If it’s not, then it’s one of the other 999 pieces of crap thrown into the multiplexes starring Sandra Bullock or “J Lo” every year.
This is not one of those movies.
There is no Meet Cute. The dialogue is often awkward and stilted and the characters generally have nothing witty to say at a precisely timed point. The two main characters meet, fall in love, and are unflinchingly honest with each other throughout the movie, and it’s understood from Point A to Point B that they will end up together. The suspense is not in the build of the romance — we know how the movie ends. Really, the romance is not the plot. The plot is about Barry Egan.
Barry Egan (played, as you can probably guess, by Adam Sandler) is like what the Waterboy or the guy from Anger Management or Mr. Deeds or a thousand other repressed idiots played by Sandler would be like in the real world. Raised with seven sisters and emasculated by constant heckling from them, Barry has no way to deal with the real world and is unable to figure out the rules of the game as he goes along. In one of my favorite character moments, for instance (sadly deleted from the movie) he makes small talk with a group of thugs stealing $750 from him, because he’s unsure of the social etiquette of the situation. Anyway, he’s also angry. Very angry. Not funny, wacky, Hollywood angry like the Waterboy, but the kind of anger people with very low self-esteem develop towards themselves and the world out of frustration at themselves and everyone around them when they can’t communicate their anger in normal ways. Barry never confronts people — he doesn’t have the skills for it — so instead he explosively puts his foot through a plate-glass window to express his hurt feelings after being razzed by his sisters. It’s a very, very scary character because he’s someone that’s one wrong turn away from a messy suicide. There’s a funny moment where he asks his brother-in-law for help, but it turns out that he’s not that kind of doctor. In another movie, that would be the punchline, but in this movie it’s just another weird social faux pas in a series of them, as we see this poor guy, emotionally beaten down by his sisters, trying to reach out for help and even screwing that up.
One sister tries to set him up with a friend from work, but even then he interprets that as making fun of him, because he can’t accept that someone might be doing something nice for him. And indeed, while his sisters are obnoxious and can’t understand why he always acts so weird, there’s nothing inherently abnormal about the way they treat him — Barry internalizes EVERYTHING, leading up to another very scary moment when his sister is teasing him about wanting the friend’s number after all, and he finally confronts her by releasing his pent-up frustrations in a socially inappropriate rant. He’s not stupid or borderline retarded like some of his previous characters, he’s just a guy who would be normal under other circumstances, stuck in a world that plays by rules he can’t cope with.
So he meets Lena, played by the lovely and talented Emily Watson, and immediately she discovers all his foibles (much to his dismay) and just as quickly she accepts them and that’s that. He has an awkward moment over dinner with her as she brings up a sore story from his childhood, and he reacts by beating the hell out of an innocent bathroom and getting kicked out of the restaurant. Barry’s not so much crazy as in need of a Slam-Man.
I think she knew, although he told her later on anyway, because that’s the guy he is. He also says stupid things (“From here, this really looks like Hawaii”, he notes, while sitting on the beach of Hawaii) because in real life, we don’t have a script to work from.
The actual plot of the movie, and the thing that drives his change in character, involves a call to a phone-sex line in a moment of loneliness before he meets Lena. And pudding. Barry, who doesn’t travel, discovers a loophole in a Healthy Choice offer for free air miles (based on a true story) and starts buying pudding cups at 25 cents a pop, which would yield 1,000,000 air miles for a mere $3000 investment. “But you don’t travel” notes his friend, Lance. “Yeah, but these things are like currency now.” He retorts, and he’s got a point. While this obsession drives him in one direction, he goes in another one when the phone-sex operator who gets him off calls him back the next day asking for more money from him, since he runs his own business and all. He refuses (in his passive-aggressive Barry Egan type of way) and soon she gets more insistent, until thugs are chasing him down the street (and even then he stops to notice that they’re beating him up in front of an “Everything for 99 cents” store, where pudding might be sold ) and he’s screaming for his life.
Some people had a problem with his sudden change of character with regards to the goons — when he first meets them, he runs in terror like a girl. The second time, they t-bone his car and nearly knock Lena out of the car as a result, and he calmly beats the hell out of all four guys in cold, efficient manner. This, they say, doesn’t gibe. They, I say, don’t understand the character. Barry is driven by self-loathing and doesn’t consider himself worthy of fighting for. When confronted by four goons intent on getting money from him, he runs. When they indirectly harm Lena, they’re harming the person who allows him to express himself without smashing things, and they’re also harming the person he DOES consider worthy of fighting for. He’s like the Incredible Hulk — shoot him with verbal machine guns and he’ll suffer the bullets so as not to admit weakness, but go after Betty Ross and you’re FUCKED.
At a brisk 90 minutes, this is PT’s shortest film, and visually one of his most beautiful. Barry spends the film wearing a bright blue suit, which is contrasted against EVERYTHING in every way possible so as to highlight the essential blueness of it. I think you can get the symbolism pretty easily there. Everything is filmed as though at a respectful distance, in long shots and big swishing pans — it’s like the director understands that Barry needs his space, and always makes sure to give it to him. It’s not so much a movie as a character study in some ways, as visually and editorially it’s focused on Barry Egan, which is funny given how worthless Barry thinks himself to be. In fact, I think Barry would probably consider PT Anderson to be making fun of him, too, by dedicating an entire movie to his little romance with Lena. But he’s not, I assure you.
The movie isn’t pat, either — Barry is still a very screwed up guy, make no mistake, but at least he’s got someone to talk to now. And it’s a start.
Punch-Drunk Love is one of the best, and most tragically overlooked by both his attention-span-challenged fanboys and the usual J-Lo worshipping teenagers, movies of 2002 and if you want a very real and sometimes ugly glimpse into how sometimes romance isn’t as pretty as you see on TV, I highly recommend this movie.
The Video:
Done as a Superbit release by Columbia, the transfer is of course flawless as advertised. Full of bright, blooming colors (many of them primary) and contrast cranked up to the max (like Lance opening up the main doors of the warehouse at 8 AM to bright sunlight) this disc handles it all perfectly with no signs of compression problems or color bleeding. Absolutely terrific.
The Audio:
You wouldn’t think of this movie as one to give your system a workout, but it comes with both DTS and Dolby Digital EX (6.1) tracks, and both are amazing given the limited usage you’d expect. In fact, they’re quite robust (check out the car crash that starts the movie and when Barry shatters the glass at the party) when need be and the music provides thumping bass throughout the early part of the movie. They could have easily scrimped here and didn’t in the least. Very impressive indeed.
The Extras:
This is a pretty artsy movie, and so are the extras. Since this is Superbit, it’s just the movie on the first disc, and all the extras have their own disc. And you get
– “Blossoms & Blood”, a 12-minute short film edited together with music from the composer and deleted scenes and alternate takes from the movie, which highlights the romantic interludes with Lena & Barry, and in a hilarious moment, Barry trying to casually pull all the pudding cups off the supermarket shelf. Definitely not your standard extra.
– 12 “Scopitones”, which are 10-second long visual poems based around the flashes of artwork that are seen throughout the movie. Hard to describe these, really.
– Deleted scenes, two of them. One featuring more verbal abuse over the phone by the sisters, and another with that great moment of Barry trying to figure out the proper way to be mugged.
– 3 trailers.
– A “Mattress Man” commercial, as Philip Seymour Hoffman (who plays the owner of the phone-sex line, fronted by a mattress store) once again suffers for his art. Think Mick Foley here.
– Artwork by Jeremy Blake, featured in various forms throughout the movie.
There’s no actual documentaries or special features here, but that’s kind of apropos for such a flaky movie, I guess. Art for art’s sake, if you will. Besides, this is the kind of movie that would suffer from pulling back the curtain and seeing Sandler goofing around on the set or PT Anderson making out with Fiona Apple (are they still together?) or whatever. The extras aren’t for everyone’s taste, but it’s all about the MOVIE with this release anyway.
The Ratings:
The Film: *****
The Video: *****
The Audio: ****
The Extras: ***
