Review: Punch Drunk Love (2002)

I’d like to start by saying that I’m a sort-of fan of PT Anderson. I really enjoyed Magnolia, Boogie Nights was well-done if not entirely rewatchable and I am in absolute love with There Will Be Blood. Punch Drunk Love was recommended to me after I put together a list of quirky, romantic movies last week. A great many people said that they loved it. Thus, it is with a heavy heart that I state - this movie did nothing for me. While I can appreciate Anderson’s strange imagery and Adam Sandler’s excellent if not amazing performance, the end result was something that lacked any sense of purpose.

The story follows Barry Egan, a man filled with anxiety about everything. He has seven sisters that are completely nuts and he’s not so stable himself. He eventually meets a girl, Lena, who seems intent on stalking him no matter what. They awkwardly court, Barry gets hunted by thugs hired by a phone-sex operator and everything works out in the end.

Even though the movie comes in at just over 90 minutes, that’s really all there is to it. The rest of the movie time is spent putting abstract symbolism on display, cutting to random light-shows and actively ignoring any character development other than Barry’s.

I generally like movies with lots of symbolism to them, but it sometimes seems like Anderson throws things into his movies purely at random. It’s almost like he writes down 20 objects or situations on pieces of paper, throws them into a hat and then pulls a few out at random points while he’s finishing the script. Thus, I didn’t care about the symbolism. None of it linked together for any purpose and so there was no mystery to unravel. I just didn’t care after a while. I understood the whole “life is chaos, emotions are chaos” thing he had going, but making the script chaotic only goes so far.

It doesn’t even work as a romance to me. Aside from the fact that there’s a story of a girl and a boy and they get together at the end, I didn’t feel like you could call this a romance. The character of Lena is left devoid of development. They could have swapped out any other girl and the story would have remained the same. She is a hollow reflection of Barry’s needs and all the struggles he undergoes to obtain her mean nothing simply based on the fact that all he needed to do was sit in a seat and wait. Lena was, after all, stalking him without reason. There was no need to pursue her. And there was no connection between the two characters other than the mechanical need to have another person nearby.

If showing the dating world as a parallel to mating in the animal kingdom was Anderson’s goal, he achieved it. If romance was the real message, than I didn’t see it in the slightest. The closest they even got to that was with a weird exchange between the two characters in which they bombard each other with violent words of love. But since we don’t see Lena as an actual human being, there’s no connection to Barry. He’s just echoing back at himself.

Rotten Tomatoes gives Punch Drunk Love a rating of 79/78%. If I could rate this purely based on Sandler’s performance, I would put that higher. If I had to rate the script, it would be a lot lower. Together, I think that’s a pretty generous rating. Either I didn’t get it or it was, just as I suspect, a scattered movie that tries to explain the human condition by removing the audience’s connection to the human condition.

Photo Credits -           

Punch Drunk Love courtesy of screened.com