| Kit Stookey |
Punch-Drunk Love 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.
When I first watched Punch-Drunk Love, I treated it like a horror movie, viewing parts of it between just-parted fingers. It was film as punishment. I had made my partner watch Shiva, Baby and experience all of its Gen-Z Jewish awkwardness. Now, he wanted to show me some Gen X Jewish rage as Adam Sandler’s Barry Egan tries and fails to navigate work and family life without an explosion destroying everything in its wake (or at least a sliding glass door).
I’m not sure why I watched Punch-Drunk Love for a second time, what compelled me to try again after an experience that was almost physically painful. But I did watch it a second time, and I realized that I am Barry Egan, and the snippets of Barry’s life we see on the screen make for one of the most realistic rom-coms I have ever seen.
Barry begins this movie as most of us do—unsure, but trying to put his best foot forward as he comes to work early in his technicolor blue suit that’s mismatched and way too formal for his warehouse setting. He is not yet successful at selling novelty plungers to hotel chains or buying enough Healthy Choice products to essentially have unlimited frequent flyer miles. His schemes are strange, out-of-step with the rest of the world.
It would make sense if his sisters pooh-pooed these ideas, which seem to come straight out of a cartoon. Instead, they cannot even see Barry for the man he has become, but constantly bring him back to their childhood, calling his office phone in the middle of business meetings to remind him of the time when he broke a sliding glass door after one of his sisters called him a “gay boy.” At the dinner party, he even mirrors his childhood behavior by once again destroying a sliding glass door where his sisters, again, make him feel so impotent by their every action and attitude that he reverts way back.
Most people, at some point in our lives, strive for emotional growth, to change ourselves for the better despite the messages we internalized about ourselves growing up. Many of us do make some strides towards self-actualization. But we slip up, often. Barry smashes doors, destroys restaurant bathrooms; I refuse to acknowledge a need for food or a preference for a movie unless my partner does first, sometimes leaving us in stalemates that last half an hour or more. We can grow and become better versions of ourselves, but ultimately, we remain who we are—highly fallible people.
Few rom-coms full-heartedly pretend that we can be made perfect by our love (the only one that comes to mind for me is 13 Going on 30, which also has time travel and possible travel through dimensions). Most tend to show our faults as altogether harmless—the girls too busy being brainiacs to know love or social graces like Drew Barrymore’s Josie Gellar in Never Been Kissed, or boys who are too bad like Heath Ledger’s Patrick Verona in 10 Things I Hate About You. But these are charming movie flaws, not real-life flaws.
As much as Punch-Drunk Love feels straight out of a cartoon (the vivid reds and blues, the stars dancing on its opening shots), its characters are flawed and strange. We know, vividly, Barry Egan’s off-putting ways by the end of his dinner with his family. We don’t get to know Lena quite as well, but we get hints of her strangeness when she confesses to Barry that she wants to “bite [his] cheek and chew on it,” and scoop at his eyes, while she is at it. She may mask better than Barry does, but she is not as normal as Barry’s sister, Elizabeth, thinks. As the movie progresses, we don’t see her revealing herself being more and more normal, but stranger and stranger, and welcoming to Barry’s particular kind of strange. She confesses that she saw Barry’s photo in Elizabeth’s office and, knowing his sisters’ complete lack of boundaries with their little brother, probably also heard the stories about his rages, and yet still pursues him anyway.
Still, despite the film’s strangeness, in spite of flaws that are not easy to love, the film does show growth through love. When “Mattress King” Dean Trumbell (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) initially sends his team of brothers to harass Barry, he quickly acquiesces to their demands for thousands of dollars (“$500 is a lot of money for a guy like me”), but is still chased down like a roadrunner without the cunning of its cartoon iteration. When the brothers, however, ram their car into his with Lena in the passenger seat and subsequently hurt her, Barry screws up his courage (and his rage) to not only scream at Dean Trumbell over the phone, but manically drive across state lines to confront him. It is in the back of Dean’s Mattress shop, as the Phone Sex Sister is cutting his hair, that Barry articulates what Lena’s love has done for him: “I have so much strength in me. I have a love in my life. It makes me stronger than anything that you can imagine.” Dean, thwarted by Barry’s sheer determination, finally backs down.
Granted, I don’t see a situation in the near future where my partner or I will need to drive all night to scream our lungs out at a scammy mattress man. My life—and probably yours—is not a cartoon. Love, however, does make us stronger, even as it often brings our flaws into focus, even if we would rather watch the movie of our lives through our fingers rather than facing our flaws directly.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon