Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
A socially awkward and volatile small business owner meets the love of his life after being threatened by a gang of scammers.
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25 films that influenced Punch-Drunk Love
What critics say influenced Punch-Drunk Love
I still have the soundtrack on vinyl somewhere around here, but other than "He Needs Me" � so good Paul Thomas Anderson stole it for Punch-Drunk Love � I wish the songs still held any charm for me.
The surface simplicity also masks the complexity and absurdity of Anderson's vision, from Barry's electric blue suit and the starkness and size of his warehouse workplace to the propulsive percussion of Jon Brion's score and the loopy use of an off-key ditty from Robert Altman's infamous movie musical of Popeye as the central love theme.
Throughout most of this sequence, draped like a ratty, comfy bathrobe over a rumpled bed, Anderson weaves a song called "He Needs Me," which was recorded by Shelley Duvall for Robert Altman's 1980 Popeye movie, of which I am a lonely admirer.
Robert Altman re-imagined Popeye for his 1980 movie, attempting to contextualize frustration and pent-up aggression, showing us that underneath that old cartoon lay very real anger brought about by very real problems.
The film looks good and has its funny moments, but too often one senses Anderson straining to impress, whether by purloining (and misusing) a Harry Nilsson song from Altman's Popeye, or by tossing in yet another surreal, surprising or seemingly inexplicable narrative idiosyncrasy.
And Anderson must be credited with at least one stroke of pure genius -- digging up a Shelley Duvall-sung Harry Nilsson song from Robert Altman's Popeye and using it to far greater effect than that original movie ever did.
The electric blue suit that Sandler wears throughout the film was, according to Anderson, inspired by a similar suit in Vincente Minnelli's great movie musical "The Band Wagon."
The way Anderson uses that persona, though, is as inspired as Martin Scorsese's use of Jerry Lewis in The King of Comedy.
Not since Scorsese cast Jerry Lewis opposite De Niro in The King of Comedy, perhaps, has an apparently incongruous collaboration between director and comedian set so many tongues a-waggingand it might be that long since we've seen a major-studio film this brazenly and thrillingly bizarre.
These veneers beg to be stripped away: Where Scorcese saw Lewis as a cynical, bitter Johnny Carson in The King of Comedy, Anderson sees an impulsive, self-destructive loser in Adam Sandler.
Imagine a satanic marriage of Lars Von Trier (Emily Watson from Breaking the Waves, from which he also borrows scene transition art) and Robert Altman (this is Anderson's version of Altman's A Perfect Couple) and you have Punch-Drunk Love.
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Consider the opening of Mitchell Leisen's classic Easy Living, its plot set in motion when fed-up millionaire Edward Arnold tosses his spoiled wife's fur coat out a window and it lands on working girl Jean Arthur, changing her life.
The frenetic pace of modernism was caricatured by both Tashlin's quick-edit animation sequences and Lewis' mania; the exaggerated physical stunts of Tashlin's cartoons translated into the fractious ruckus of his social satires like Artists and Models, Hollywood or Bust, and The Disorderly Orderly?which, incidentally, have left Jerry Lewis himself in a near-crippled state.
The frenetic pace of modernism was caricatured by both Tashlin's quick-edit animation sequences and Lewis' mania; the exaggerated physical stunts of Tashlin's cartoons translated into the fractious ruckus of his social satires like Artists and Models, Hollywood or Bust, and The Disorderly Orderly?which, incidentally, have left Jerry Lewis himself in a near-crippled state.
The frenetic pace of modernism was caricatured by both Tashlin's quick-edit animation sequences and Lewis' mania; the exaggerated physical stunts of Tashlin's cartoons translated into the fractious ruckus of his social satires like Artists and Models, Hollywood or Bust, and The Disorderly Orderly?which, incidentally, have left Jerry Lewis himself in a near-crippled state.
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Barry is a dissonant character, out of place in his new blue suit (like Elliott Gould's from The Long Goodbye) and unloved by anyone but his employees.
If you can imagine the sort of picture Martin Scorsese's dark urban comedy "After Hours" (1985) might have been had it starred Jerry Lewis rather than Griffin Dunne, you'll have some notion of what Paul Thomas Anderson's followup to "Magnolia" is like.
Think of a fusion of a violent, razor�s edge (but not black) comedy like Demme�s Something Wild or Scorsese�s After Hours and a Jacque Tati film like Mon Oncle and you might come close to approximating the sophisticated humor that the film packs.