I don’t get excited about many movies anymore. When I watch them with friends I am relieved to know that their presence will keep me there for the whole film.
Not so with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love. I felt like a little child watching it three nights ago. It is hard to contain my excitement and admiration for this film, but first an anecdote;
I didn’t like this movie the first time I saw it at 17. I thought it strange. I was going out that night and offered it to my mom, who was staying home. I told her to watch out because it was a little weird. When I returned home that night I went into the living room.
“How was it?”
“Oh it was really strange.”
Her reaction seemed too much, so I went over to the DVD player and took out the disc. She had watched the special features, shuffling from interview to interview. Strange movie indeed.
But brilliant. Adam Sandler’s performance is stunning. As Roger Ebert says in his review “Given a director and a screenplay that sees through the Sandler persona, that understands it as the disguise of a suffering outsider, Sandler reveals depths and tones we may have suspected but couldn’t bring into focus.”
Sandler plays Barry Egan, a lonely, repressed, productive and wholly idiosyncratic purveyor of novelty toilet plungers (known as fungers). His seven sisters constantly invade his life with phonecalls, advice, and embarrassing childhood stories. After kicking in a sliding glass door at one of his sister’s embarrassing birthday parties, Barry calls a phone sex hotline. The consequences of his phonecall and his involvement with Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), become the two stabilizing plot lines in this wonderfully unpredictable romantic story.
This is musical comedy in the tradition of Ernst Lubitsch and a personal favorite; Jean Luc Godard’s A Woman is A Woman. Of the many brilliant elements in this film, the performances, the cinematography and the writing, what struck me the most this time was the music. The film was loaded with it, and it helped the prevailing mood tremendously. Godard called A Woman is a Woman a “Neorealist Musical, that is, a contradiction in terms.” I don’t think that is necessarily the case. Both elements enhance each other, the playfulness and surrealism of the musical completments the realism and emotional identification of naturalism.
One of the most famous musical collaborations in the History of Film took place between director Sergei Eisenstein and composer Sergei Prokofiev on the film Alexander Nevsky. Prokofiev worked on the music throughout the production process, and the famous battle on the ice was cut to his already finished score.
PT Anderson and Jon Brion used a similar collaborative process in the creation of Punch Drunk Love. Sandler’s relationship to the harmonium that is literally dropped in front of him is based in part on Brion’s own experience. He also found and repaired a harmonium in the exact same fashion as Barry does in the film. Anderson knew while writing the script that he wanted a harmonium in the film and worked very closely with Brion, who took detailed notes, on creating the music during the production of the film.
A testament to bringing composers in early as true collaborators. Right now it often feels as though composers are used as “emotional correction,” in a similar manner to color correction. I generally dislike music in films exactly for this reason; they’re trying to tell you what to feel. The effect is infinitely more subtle and beautiful in Punch Drunk Love, I believe in part because the music developed organically in harmony with the other parts of the film. Music composition is just like any other creative process, it requires time, thought, revision, and a lot of work. Every bit of it paid off in this film. Wonderful.
Barry Egan starts the film alone and at work.
