Punch-Drunk Love: The Best Movie Charlie Chaplin Never Made

Punch-Drunk Love is the best film Charlie Chaplin never made. Every time I see it it makes me want to just hug it and kiss it and whisper how much I love it into its ear.

It is also one of the darkest romantic comedies in, well, I don't really have a point of reference, so maybe ever?

It's a beautiful, sloppy, colourful, loving embrace of a film. It plays as if it's trapped somewhere between the cinema-as-a-state-of-mind of Scorsese's After Hours with the tender, loving touch of the Little Tramp starring in a classic Astaire and Rogers picture. This film's aesthetic is classic, simple, surreal L.A. through and through

This was to be a minor film for its writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson after his epic emotional train wreck of a masterpiece Magnolia (still my vote for the best film of the 90s for anyone who cares) and that about fit's this film's tone perfectly.

As opposed to the emotional vortex that threatened to destroy everything in its path that was Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love is a quite, more ephemeral love/art collage of a film about a sad/angry child trapped deep inside the exterior frame of a man so reserved in his day-to-day that he has reduced himself to simply getting by with being noticed as little as possible. It's a mini-masterpiece, jaggedly cobbled together from Anderson's love of Adam Sandler comedies, a sleazy mattress man, a beautiful muse and a stranger-than-fiction true story of a marketing mistake that allowed people to collect extra frequent flyer miles by purchasing cups of pudding.

This is Barry Egan, a strange man in a strange fitting blue suit. When we meet him he's opening up shop for the day. He runs a business that sells novelty bathroom plungers for which, I can only imagine, there is next to no current demand.

Barry has seven sisters who are planning a party this evening and keep interrupting his business meetings for phone calls that bark out orders and demean him based on his choice of words in expressing himself.

He smiles on, returns to reality, looks to the ground, buries the pain deep and manages to croak out the fewest syllables possible that, contrary to his belief, don't even go halfway to hiding his pain. This is a sad, unhappy, misunderstood child with no sense of how to escape his mind and grow into the man he should by now be.

But before any of this, Barry opens the shutter doors, looks down the parking lot with his morning thermos in hand and sees a horrific and completely unexplained vehicle accident, abruptly followed by a van, which pulls up, drops a harmonium just as unexpectedly onto the curb and leaves. Barry is horrified; doesn't know what to do; takes cover inside. Such a violent eruption followed by such a beautiful and innocent artifact. The tone for the film has been set.

Barry peeks out from around the corner. The harmonium is still there. He goes to fetch it. This is maybe the first source of comfort Barry has ever had in his life. The music they make together is sad and yet poignant to the point of beauty.

So Barry, very reluctantly, goes to a party his sisters are throwing where they all remind him of the time they were calling him gay boy and he got so mad he threw a hammer through the window. He claims he doesn't remember, the truth plainly being that he doesn't want to remember and doesn't particularly need to be reminded either.

He loses it, kicks in the sliding glass doors, and then asks his doctor brother-in-law if he can help him. Sometimes he doesn't like himself and cries for no reason. "Barry, I'm a dentist, “is the reply he gets. Barry is so far reserved from reality that even his attempts to get help come off as misinformed and pathetic. He needs help but doesn’t know where to begin in trying to get it.

Then two things happen. In a desperate need to talk to someone, Barry calls a phone sex line and ends up being blackmailed for money he doesn't have by a mattress man played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who's introductory shot is one of those great Hollywood look-who-it-is moments and comes, not as a mild surprise, but as if hurled at the screen with intent. Does anyone but Anderson shoot films like this in Hollywood anymore? Could anyone but Hoffman have made such an impactful entrance without yet a single word of dialogue?

He also, very reluctantly as well, meets Lena (Emily Watson, maybe never lovelier). She's a friend of the one sister who actually seems to want to communicate with Barry and thinks that they should go on a date. Barry doesn't agree but Lena talks him into it.

These are the two single most important events in Barry's life.

The remainder of the film sees Barry completely smitten with Lena, allowing him an outlet for all of the childish love and beautify in his soul that he only shared before with the harmonium to be given to and understood by a real person. He is capable of love and so desperately wants it but has absolutely no idea of how to act it out in physical form. Thankfully, Lena, the beauty in the red dress, isn't afraid to see past his exterior and to help him along, a little bit at a time. Maybe there truly is one perfect person for everyone after all.

In one of the oddest and yet most touching scenes that comes to mind, Barry, lying on top of her, tells Lena that she is so beautiful that he just wants to get a hammer and smash her fucking face in. In the span of no more than a second or two, she reflects, understands and responds that he makes her want to gouge his eyes out. His response to this is, as expected, quiet and awkward, but for him, plays more like rapture. Not only has he found a love in his life, but he's found his Venus de Milo.
No explanation is ever given as to why this angel would love this strange little man-child, and yet, just as when the blind girl laid eyes on the Little Tramp for the first time in City Lights, the moment is so poignant it's hard to hold the tears of joy back. All the while Anderson paints a beautiful visual portrait of light and colour around these two.

I wanted to have one final word on Adam Sandler. When Punch-Drunk Love first came out in 2002 most of the initial reviews felt the film was minor by Anderson standards but was still a point of interest for the deep notes of pain and internal strife that Adam Sandler was able to find.
Say what you will about Sandler and his usual angry-man-child with funny voices shtick, this is a great performance that understands the depth and sadness of Barry Egan and how he confuses not dealing with things as the same as concealing them from the world.  

And so now, for the rest of eternity, Adam Sandler will have his name on one, lone masterpiece in which he perfectly brought a character to life that stands totally on it’s one while also being worth comparing to the Little Tramp. He'll probably never be in anything this good again but that is, at the end of the day, more than most actors will ever achieve.

Grown Ups

There’s nothing particularly wrong with Grown Ups exact that there’s nothing particularly right with it either. It’s everything you’d expect from an Adam Sandler comedy: it’s got poo and pee and grown men acting like stupid children, talking about the things that most fascinate those who never quite managed to grow out of grade eight like boobies and tree ropes and shooting arrows into the sky and seeing who is the last to run for cover, etc. It’s all perfectly serviceable and inoffensive, but so what? Why be content on being stuck in middle ground? It’s amusing without every really being funny; nice without ever really being sweet; and immature without every really being rambunctious. And then it ends. It's characters go on vacation and the movie goes right along with them. The film stars all of Adam Sandler’s go to guys: David Spade, Chris Rock, Kevin James and Rob Schneider, who all, more or less, play variations of their go to character. They’re five high school buddies who go back for a weekend at the old cottage after the death of their beloved basketball coach. Their week, unsurprisingly, will consist of them all sitting around, drinking beers, trading one-liner insults as if they’d been keeping them to themselves all these years, and just general screwing around. Every once in a while they decide to get up and actually do something like a trip to the water park in which, first one, and then all of them realize that the dye they put in the water to detect pee isn’t an old fairy tale after all. Grown Ups does a lot of that. It’ll give you a joke that is kind of amusing and then repeat it again and again. This is the unfortunate case for Spade who, while running, trips over a stump to land face first in doo-doo only to, moments later, have it put right back there when Sadler runs over his back. It’s like director Dennis Dugan and his boys need to either make sure they wring it for every laugh it can get or to make sure we understand just how funny they are being. And that’s ultimately the problem. All of these men, at any given moment, are acting as if they are really funny guys. The best comedy happens when it involves people who don’t know that comedy is happening to them. Every laugh in Grown Ups seems to come packaged with a wink to the camera. Although Grown Ups is a pedestrian movie in which its stars can all play it safe and phone it in, Spade, although never mistaken for a great comedic talent, is particularly lazy playing the freewheeling Marcus who drinks too much, sleeps on the couch, beds anything that gives him a second look and is that crass, bloated moron that no one really likes, but you don’t have the heart to tell. Spade’s been playing that character his entire career and here essentially looks like a man who walked on set, delivered his lines once and went back to bed. As for the rest of the cast: Rock is reduced to bad puns about his mother-in-law’s enormous bunions; Sandler does Sandler; while James, the most likable of the bunch manages to get off a few laughs here and there. Schnieder however, again not surprisingly, plays right into big caricature as the pretentious, toupee clad spiritualist husband of a much older woman and three daughters, only one of which, of course, is believable as his. The story has a mild message about how Sandler, not too believable as a powerful Hollywood agent, is distressed that his kids are too lazy to do anything for themselves and spend all day playing violent video games, and wants them to get outside and discover the fun of nature that him and his buddies had when they were young. The wives of the men are played by Salma Hayek, Maria Bello and Maya Rudolph who bring more star power to an already crowded story. In the end the movie is too bland, the characters all too nice, and the comedy all too unsophisticated to really work. The guys seem to be having fun, and that helps, but in the end, the realization creeps in that the premise of five guys sitting around at a beautiful cottage, going over the past would be a lot more enjoyable to be doing than watching.