| MH Rowe |
The Master plays on glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, March 16th, through Tuesday, March 18th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
It qualifies neither as an obscure bit of Hollywood trivia nor as a famous declaration of aesthetic taste, but you may or may not happen to know that the director Paul Thomas Anderson once went on at length in an interview about his love for Adam Sandler films in general and for the male-rage adoption comedy Big Daddy (1999) in particular. He also praised Adam Sandler’s face, its physical beauty. If you happen to know this middling bit of lore, then you may innocently wonder why Anderson felt that way and what he sees in blockbuster films like the sweet but lame Big Daddy. The alarmingly unequivocal answer to that question is and always was Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002). To live this truth, like an acolyte memorizing the tenets of the new Sandlerian faith, walk the righteous path: Go watch Big Daddy. Go watch Happy Gilmore (1996). If you can stand it—and I really cannot fucking stand it—go watch The Waterboy (1998). Only then can you return to the sweet, strange charms of Punch-Drunk Love and see it true, as if for the first time.
Something, however, is wrong. More than twenty years since it was released (and commercially failed, a legitimate bomb), Punch-Drunk Love continues to exist in a continuum that ends, for the time being, with the Safdie brothers’ stress-thriller, Uncut Gems (2019), in which Sandler also starred. That continuum is a vast, portentous tunnel resounding with surprised and tiresome declarations that Adam Sandler can, in fact, act. Not only can he act, the continuum implies, but he allies himself with impressively odd and auteurist projects of idiosyncratic sensibility. Apologies to the beloved subgenre of film criticism that is tickled to announce that professional actors can act—perhaps a special concession should be made in the case of comedians, as everyone loves a sad clown—but Punch-Drunk Love is not, in its outer appearance or inmost soul, a departure from the template of Adam Sandler films established in the 1990s. It’s not even Paul Thomas Anderson’s “take” on the “Adam Sandler film.” It simply is an Adam Sandler film.
Everything in Punch-Drunk Love corresponds to some feature or detail in prior Sandler films, leaving aside the film’s earnest atmosphere of old-fashioned Hollywood musicals. Consider it a patchwork Sandleriana but of epic, dreamy proportion. First of all, there’s the blue suit Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) wears throughout the film. In all of his previous films, Sandler had dressed much the way he infamously appears on the red carpet or during talk show appearances: baggy, loose clothing in defiance of any pretense to being fashionable or cool. Flip flops, maybe untied shoes. Unbuttoned shirts, t-shirts with stretched-out necks. He has always cultivated an air of near-slovenliness. In a film like Big Daddy, Sandler’s outfit feels paradigmatic of the narrative’s journey to articulate manhood, if not quite maturity, for he dons a suit in the finale, a dramatic courtroom scene of father-son sentimental reproach and reconciliation. In Punch-Drunk Love, as Barry Egan, he wears a suit from the opening. When asked why he’s wearing it—other characters react to the suit as if the day before the film begins he had been dressed just the way Sandler is in Billy Madison—he simply explains, “I don’t know.” Barry Egan has already begun to grope toward a certain (conservative) notion of upright decency: dress smart for self-control. He is, after all, a business owner.
Recall next that Sandler famously plays guitar and sings very silly songs. His musical inclinations figure prominently in a film like The Wedding Singer (1998). As if in homage, the opening of Punch-Drunk Love features an old harmonium dumped by strangers in front of the industrial driveway of Barry Egan’s plumbing supply business. Immediately before the harmonium was deposited in front of him, Barry witnessed a crash involving a single car, which inexplicably flips into the air while driving down the street and violently rolls side over side, strewing shattered metal and billions of bits of broken glass on the pavement. That a sensitive instrument would violently and loudly find its way to Barry presages the arrival of Lena Leonard (Emily Watson, wonderful), dressed in a passionate but measured red and pink to Barry’s shy, melancholic blue. Barry indeed spends the rest of the film tentatively playing the keys of the harmonium, which has been gifted to him by the whimsical street gods of urban Los Angeles: gods who can destroy you horribly in your car or bestow on you a responsive tool of self-expression.
The comparisons mount and mount. As in Big Daddy, Sandler has an extended scene of screaming improvised death threats into a telephone. As in Happy Gilmore, which featured Christopher McDonald as the villainous Shooter McGavin, Punch-Drunk Love features Philip Seymour Hoffman as the villainous mattress impresario and phone-sex ripoff artist, Dean Trumbell. Both McGavin and Trumbell have the exact same cheap suavity, slightly off fashion sense, and a titanic confidence backed up by accidental self-mockery. Hoffman’s violent energy matches Sandler’s, too. His goons are scary at first, but when Barry finally responds in kind, beating them back with a tire iron before confronting Trumbell, his stated reason for his newfound power could be right out of Big Daddy: “I have a love in my life. It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine.” His redemption menaces the world around him. Love is not a guarantee against violence.
The broad strokes of Punch-Drunk Love nevertheless suggest both homage and a serious reflection or revision of Sandleriana. Where a previous Sandler film might have sniggered at a man calling a number for phone sex, the long scene in which Barry does so capitalizes instead on the stalwart loneliness of the man willing to masturbate when he’s told to do so. He recognizes that fantasies are helpful. A sexy and impatient woman on the phone told him so. It may be juvenile but it’s also innocent. Innocence is the condition of letting yourself be led around.
As in other Sandler fare, the women here are either cruel and suspect, or far more mature than the men. Start with the main fantasy woman. Lena Leonard is a woman of such loving grace and understanding that the film can simply gloss over her sweet and nearly stalker-ish pursuit of Barry Egan, so enthralled is she by his “adorable” face. As if in compensating fairness, Egan is a fantasy of male humiliation. He’s shy, awkward, and actively pursuing a coupon-related scheme that seems to be the result of a marketing error, whereby the purchase of many pudding cups can translate into an absurd abundance of frequent-flier miles. As if to emphasize the compounded reality he should dream of escaping, Barry has seven sisters. They harass him about attending a family party and then, upon his arrival, casually banter and laugh about how they used to call him “gayboy.” The memory amuses them all the more when they recall Barry’s enraged juvenile reaction to their provocation. After a few minutes at the party, he waits until a quiet moment and kicks the glass of a sliding door to pieces. Whereas the violent feelings in other Sandler films might have brought a frown to your mother’s face, here even a fan of the film cringes at the realism of Barry’s outrage. When he asks one of his brothers in law for help, he dissolves into tears “for no reason” and walks away. Much later, when Lena says tenderly that she wants to eat his face, Barry can only respond by suggesting smashing her face with a sledgehammer—a teasing but violent idea she accepts in comically gracious good faith.
The film’s final scene, almost an epilogue, may be the most moving scene in Anderson’s filmography. Where Big Daddy ends with comical assurance (marriage, baby, vindication against your ex who now works at Hooters), Punch-Drunk Love secures its lovers in their newfound happiness, just after a breathless reconciliation, but with all the terrors and joys of an unknown future. Lena enters the darkened garage of Barry’s business—the film has a couple exquisite silhouette sequences—leans over Barry, and says into his ear, “So here we go.” I should have mentioned prior to this sentence the film’s score, which perfectly calibrates every moment of mounting stress or aching romance. In that final scene, the score is playful but on the lookout. Lena’s “so here we go” sounds like a loving challenge from woman to man-child, as if to suggest all that awaits them will require from Barry Egan the enormous and terrible responsibilities of love. No more assurances, no more tidy narrative, no more safety, no one else. Take the violence of your passions, make them your enemy, make them your friend. The lesson of Adam Sandler films is that it’s exactly when you’re punch drunk, beaten, humiliated, as full of crass and howling rage, as full of love and howling tenderness as you can get, that’s when it’s finally time to live. It’s finally time for a man to live.
Edited by Matthew Tchepikova-Treon