The film that should for all purposes confirm "Magnolia" director Paul Thomas Anderson as one of the most exciting, original and inventive of modern American filmmakers, "Punch-Drunk Love" is a marvellously quirky romantic comedy of sorts that is constructed like a classic Hollywood musical without the songs and throws you a curveball at every conceivable turn. While being a romantic comedy, it is also a bitter-sweet, stylized meditation on love and loneliness and one of the sweetest melancholy tone poems you're likely to see on screen. The film centres around Adam Sandler, with Anderson typecasting him as his usual man-child persona but digging well beneath the surface to bring out his dark side and his humanity. The head of a small toiletries company, Sandler's Barry Egan is a naïf, disturbed boy, reeling from a life spent in the shadow of seven prepossessing sisters and wanting to stand up for himself in the world, but who sees it from an entirely different perspective. "Punch-Drunk Love" tells the story of how he finally meets his equally dislocated soulmate in the luminous Watson, as he exploits a loophole in a frequent-flyer pre-packaged food promotion and grapples with an harassing sex phone line operator. Exquisitely photographed by Robert Elswit in bright, ravishing colours and propelled by Anderson's fluid camerawork, the film's construction - punctuated by Jeremy Blake's garish, colourful artwork interludes - seems to flaunt every conceivable law of narrative logic and structure, but that's alright because that's the way Anderson works: you just don't expect an average romantic comedy from the guy who directed "Magnolia", and this is so much above the average that is in risk of creating something altogether different and new. Original, touching and absolutely brilliant.
Review of Punch-Drunk Love
