Review: Punch-Drunk Love
Genre: Comedy, Romance
MPAA rating: R (for strong language including a scene of sexual dialogue)
Running time: 1:37
Release date: 2002
Cast: Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Luis Guzman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Mary Lynn Rajskub
Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson
Related article: Interview with director Paul Thomas Anderson

We recall the events of our lives along a straight line, as if a world that is constantly spinning makes us too woozy to see its randomness. Movies try to make order out of this chaos, finding plot where there is none — three sequentially numbered acts in pursuit of a happy ending.

"Punch-Drunk Love" rises above this morass on an arc of unpredictability and brilliant non-sequitur. Reeling deliriously from a warehouse in the San Fernando Valley to a Technicolor kiss in Hawaii, from a hospital emergency room to the tawdry back room of a phone-sex service in Utah (apparently run by deranged, inbreeding Mormons), the movie manages to be both heartbreaking and happy, while managing to look like nothing you've ever seen before.

Following his assertively talky "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia," writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has created a visual valentine, with something alive and wonderful happening in every scene, in every shot. "Punch-Drunk" is a dizzying character study of a weirdo named Barry Egan (Adam Sandler), who reluctantly falls in love with a woman named Lena (played by two-time Academy Award nominee Emily Watson) about whom he — and come to think of it, we — know nothing.

This isn't conventional boy meets girl; it's like watching Anderson shoot two hearts into a pinball machine to see what will happen. Anderson — a pinball wizard, a mighty special kid — likes taking chances, and this film is a chance for him to show off his colossal gifts.

Anderson has used as a point of departure the true story of a civil engineer who figured out that by purchasing $3,000 worth of a company's pudding cups, he could amass more than a million frequent-flier miles. When Barry walks down a supermarket's frozen food aisle shopping for pudding cups, he whispers to himself, "What am I looking for? What am I looking for? Talk to me, talk to me, talk to me!" He's not kidding, and as the earnest, semi-autistic schlemiel, Sandler, for once, is perfect. Barry arrives early to work at the warehouse, where he is the only one with an office, suggesting he's in charge. But Barry isn't in charge of anything, least of all his life. When one of his seven sisters keeps demanding to know "why are you wearing that suit?," you get the feeling she suspects he's trying to put something over on her. His sisters call him, one after another, to ask if he is coming to their party and to remind him that he is "so weird." When he does show up at the party, we see his first burst of rage as he kicks out the glass from a sliding patio door. Later, he confides to one of his sisters' husbands: "I don't like myself sometimes. Can you help me?" After he bursts into racking sobs, the brother-in-law goes back to the party and retails this as gossip.

Barry calls a phone-sex service, and when the woman pre-coitally asks him to give her not only his credit card number but all of his personal information, he tells her everything. Talk to me, talk to me! As Barry spills out the numbers that add up to his life, Anderson keeps shifting the camera to show him surrounded by empty chairs, all alone.

Again and again, Anderson allows pictures to tell his story, and music to collect the loose threads. Standing beside an empty street, Barry suddenly hears the screech of tires, then sees a car go flying by, and finds a keyboard instrument — we later find out it's a harmonium — in the gutter. He races back to his office with this relic in his arms, past the mountain of pudding cups, and leaves it on his desk. It remains there like the obelisk in "2001," a sacred totem whose powers are suggested but never known.

When Barry abruptly flies to Hawaii to see Lena, we hear her singing "He needs me!" and from that moment on, we can see that he does. Anderson's ode to joy reaches its apex when Barry and Lena meet in the breezeway of her hotel in Hawaii, perfectly framed in an archway, her right foot raised slightly off the ground as if she were about to take flight. As the two of them hold each other, Anderson holds the shot in perfect silhouette. It looks like an old-fashioned cameo, and as people fly by them, their bodies seem fettered only to each other, and not of this Earth.