There’s a brief moment in the movie The Wedding Singer where it becomes clear what Adam Sandler is really capable of, in terms of serious acting. I don’t remember the whole context or the plot, but I remember very well his performance, in this one scene in particular. He is out at a bar with Drew Barrymore. He has an unrequited love thing going on with her. She is with another guy, who is treating her like crap in front of the Sandler character. And then she gets up to go to the bathroom or something, and this other guy says something disparaging about her behind her back. There’s more to the scene but what I remember most of all is Sandler’s acting. He barely has any lines during this scene. He is just watching. Actually, he is not “just” doing anything. He is watching their interactions like a hawk, taking in all the information. He doesn’t say much. But you can feel the anger growing in him. Anger that comes out of his love for the Barrymore character.
It’s a very moving moment, and completely memorable. But even that snippet of good leading-man-caliber acting did not prepare me for what Sandler pulls off in Punch Drunk Love. You have GOT to see it. It is extraordinary.
Within the first five minutes of the movie, I was hooked. This was done in the way Anderson makes the sunrise look over the bleak strip-mall landscape of the San Fernando Valley. It was very beautiful, but also with a quality of exquisite and painful loneliness. And there’s Barry Egan (Sandler), way over in the corner of the screen, wearing an electric blue suit, hunched over in his chair in this Kafka-esque BLEAK warehouse office. “Office” is being too kind. It’s a generic desk with a phone on it, shoved in the corner of this concrete square space. From those first images, I was seduced. That was how the movie worked on me. Like a seduction.
The movie is filled with so many surprises and weird unexplained events. And none of this unexpectedness felt random, to me. Or like a movie-director trying to be cryptic and artsy and clever. It actually felt like life. Not everything in life is connected or explained. Things work on us in subconscious nonverbal ways. Some things are meaningful only when we decide to put meaning on them.
A harmonium is randomly and anonymously dropped off outside Barry’s warehouse. Anderson doesn’t beat us over the head with symbolism, he doesn’t tell us what the harmonium “means”. But it is apparent, that with the advent of the harmonium, Barry starts to transform. Subtly.
This is a character who is congenitally unable to connect with other people. Social interactions are torturous for Barry. He tries to be normal, but then he excuses himself and beats up the bathroom. However: slowly, mysteriously, Barry forms a connection with this battered harmonium.
Adam Sandler hands over his trust, and his big movie-star ego, to P.T. Anderson and gives a performance I will never forget. I saw the movie three days ago, and it continues to be at the forefront of my mind. I am still a bit stunned at how moved I was by Sandler’s portrayal of an antisocial deeply hurt guy, with rage issues. It was real, moving, and original. Nobody but Sandler could have done the job.
One of the other things which I found piercingly … poignant … about this movie (but poignant almost to the degree of pain … the kind of sweetness that HURTS) was about how these two weird shy people come together and connect in a very real way. That is an extremely insipid way to describe the romance between Adam Sandler and Emily Watson, but I don’t know how else to do it. She does not pity him. She is clearly more functional than he is, but, without saying a word, you get that she senses his sweetness far beneath all that anger and weirdness. But she does not pity him. He’s not a charity case. She has compassion for him. And by strolling into his life (5 minutes after the harmonium shows up), she brings with her an opportunity for healing. Again, none of this is stated. That’s one of the greatest things about this movie. How little is said.
Their love story has an overwhelming feeling of purity. It’s amazing watching these two weird little souls somehow managing to connect. Their “pillow talk”…whispered at one another, in tones of awe, because they cannot believe how lucky they are to have found one another, is stunning. He whispers, in awe, “I just want to smash your face with a sledgehammer…I just want to smash it, and smash it, it’s so pretty.” You have got to hear Sandler deliver this line. It is as though he is saying, “Your skin is luminescent like the moon and your eyes sparkle like the stars of love in the heavens…” Only it’s sexier, and more emotional. She, in the same tone of awe and desire and love, whispers back, “I want to just scoop out your eyeballs.”
People cannot avoid being damaged by life. Life breaks us down, and breaks our hearts. Illusions are stripped away, dreams die, and all that is left are pieces of who you used to be. Your ideal of yourself. This movie shows that love is offering up these fragments. Unashamedly. Awkwardly. Here…this is me. I’m all broken up, and I’m upset about some things, and I’m kind of weird…but I love you, so here are these broken pieces … I wish I was all whole and perfect, and I could offer you that…but I can’t … so here’s this …
Great movie. I left feeling rubbed raw, and also healed.
