Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I’m not allowed to talk about this film.
And I understand. I do. I mean, it’s the clearest sort of conflict of interest issue there is. Harry practically is named Rodriguez at this point, the two of them are so close, so I can understand not reviewing ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO. And now I’m working for the people that produced PUNCHDRUNK LOVE, the new Paul Thomas Anderson film that is expanding even wider this Friday, building on a few weeks of excellent per-screen performance and some very solid buzz, so there’s no way I can write about it.
I mean, it doesn’t matter that I consider Paul Thomas Anderson one of the most important voices from the Class of ’99, guys who may or may not have made their first films that year, but who contributed in some way to making it a thing of majestic splendor. One of the articles I struggled most with in my work at AICN was my review of the BOOGIE NIGHTS and MAGNOLIA Platinum Edition DVDs, which I used to basically write an overview of all of his work up until then. You can read the piece here if you want. I struggled with it because I think he genuinely matters as a filmmaker, and out of the hundreds of people who make movies every year, there are only a handful who really genuinely matter. There’s names who would show up on (hopefully) any cineaste’s list, like Wes Anderson or Lars Von Trier or David Fincher or Martin Scorsese or Brad Bird or Patrice Leconte or Joel Coen or Quentin Tarantino or Spike Jonze or Peter Jackson, and there’s more, of course, and as you list those names, I would hope that Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the names that would come to mind, because what he’s doing is creating a body of work with a distinct and wonderful voice, films that stand defiantly outside of genre and easy categorization, each one a collection of artists bringing their best game to the table, caught in a moment, a unique collaboration that is orchestrated masterfully by this instinctual, almost impossibly natural filmmaker.
If I was able to talk about PUNCHDRUNK LOVE, I’d talk about how it fits perfectly into the body of work that Anderson is building. So far, his films are about love. Before they deal with anything else, they deal with love. In HARD EIGHT, we watch love rip through a friendship, and we see how love can sometimes be disguised as something else because of fear. In BOOGIE NIGHTS, we watch the way love binds people into families when they don’t have families of their own. And in MAGNOLIA, love both wounds and heals in equal measure, a terrible force that binds us all, as random and arbitrary as the coincidence in the film’s dazzling opening. Love is one of the most often written about things in film, but so many of the treatments are facile, shallow, barely more complex than the average LOVE BOAT episode. Most films that are called “romantic comedies” are sitcoms, dressed up and packed to overstuffed with movie stars to somehow diguise the fact that most of what they’re selling you is bullshit. Pretty people hooking up for the most preposterous of reasons, and we call it “romantic,” and we sell it wrapped in candy, and it’s just crap. But each of Anderson’s films so far manage to tell very specific stories about love, particular and odd and hard to explain in simple terms. And real. Above all, even when stylized as fiercely as this, this feels the way real love feels.
There are a number of reasons I should recuse myself from writing about the film. Aside from the whole Revolution issue, there’s also the fact that it hits a little close to home for me. The film is about Barry Egan (Adam Sandler), a man who lives his life like a clenched fist, a man who is so choked with rage that he is almost paralyzed. I’m not proud when I admit that I have my own rage issues, and I’m certain I’m not saying anything that most people who know me aren’t fully aware of. I don’t just get pissed at things. I rage. It’s a particular level of anger, and there are about four or five moments in this film where Barry gives in, where he opens up and lets the full force of his rage explode in a few pinpoint bursts, destroying everything he touches in those moments, and there’s only one time in the film that the release does something positive, where it actually works for Barry instead of against him. The difference between those early outbursts and the final one is simple: most are fulled by anger and loneliness and agonizing confusion, but one is fuelled entirely by love.
Seeing a film like this, a film that tells the story of someone struggling to let love in so that it can take the place of the anger and the fear and all those other things that hold us back, it’s deeply affecting. I’m always mystified when people tell me that they think I write in some persona online, or that I have tried to create some false or alternate me. It’s not true. I’ve always been as open a book as possible here, talking about my failures and my shortcomings and my weaknesses. Those are the things that make us human, these soft spots, and Anderson has given Adam Sandler the best role of his career here in Egan. Watch him closely in the film’s first half-hour. Every time any one of his seven sisters approaches him, he flinches away, like a dog that remembers a particularly savage kick. Listen to the way he circles a conversation, dodging almost every question, constantly ducking and bobbing and weaving verbally. In many ways, this is a great silent comedy performance. Even if Barry never spoke, there are so many things that Sandler does to sell the performance that it would still be the strongest thing he’s done so far. I mean, the suit alone is worth an entire essay some time, and you could do another on his small expressions of joy as something good begins to creep into his life, crowding out all that volcanic energy, forcing him to change right before our eyes.
Someone else could, I mean. I can’t. It’s against “the rules.” Never mind the fact that the only reason I ever wrote to AICN in the first place is because I love movies and I love talking about them, and I just wanted a forum where I could do that. I’m not selling you anything. I’m not here because I have to be, or because it’s my life’s calling to write reviews. I just thought it was fucking cool that people got together on the Internet to talk about common interests, things like movies, and writing for newsgroups and sending out e-mail newsletters just naturally led to me being here, where I can talk to more people at once. Never mind that. There are “rules,” evidently, about what I can and can’t fall in love with and go to see over and over again. Three times in a week, just because I love to soak the movie in, but never mind that. For the first time since I started at AICN, I’m unable to do exactly what I signed up for in the first place... talk about something I really love.
So fine. So I can’t write about it.
I can’t write about Jon Brion’s score, easily the best I’ve heard in any film this year. I can’t write about the remarkable way it works as auditory cocaine, subtly sending the pulse racing even as it plays hell with your nerves, sending you into paranoid spirals. The score puts you squarely into the head of Barry Egan, and just as he did with MAGNOLIA, Anderson stages a major sequence in the film around a song that serves as the emotional crescendo of the entire piece. In MAGNOLIA, it was that great moment where each of the characters finally gives in and gives voice to that thing that’s been building in them for the whole film, all of them united in one song, one shared desire. That’s the coincidence that Anderson is talking about in the film’s opening, the thing that we’re supposed to be looking for. How likely is it that all of those people, all of them in different types of pain, living different types of lives, could all want the same thing at the same time? It’s about as likely as a rain of frogs, or a scuba diver in a tree, or a suicide who gets shot mid-jump. It’s about as likely as a beautiful wide-eyed blonde walking into your life, ready to be loved, already sold on you at just a glance, the coincidence that seems to be derailing some critics of PUNCH-DRUNK. It’s about as likely as a man who’s never flown anywhere getting on a plane and chasing a girl to Hawaii because of one kiss, the moment that Anderson underscores to devastating effect with Shelly Duvall’s “He Needs Me” from POPEYE. I’ve always loved Harry Nilsson’s bizarre and wonderful songs from that movie (“He’s Large” is another side-splitting oddity), and the way this comic strip song gives real emotional weight to this powerful sequence should be an education to any filmmaker who cuts to a song during a film. Don’t just use some hit because it’s going to be on the soundtrack album. That sells out anything you’ve got going on in the scene. If you’re going to use music, use it to add some other level of emotional clarity to the scene, or to create some specific effect. Use it to break our hearts. Use it to shake us deeply.
I could spend pages and pages of energy talking about the remarkable gift for dialogue that Anderson has and the way it has grown stronger when pared back the way it is in the PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE screenplay, abbreviated to the point of being haiku, a suggestion of things. If I could write a review, that is.
I could write about the development of Robert Elswit as a cinematographer over the course of the four films he’s worked on with Anderson now. I could write about how remarkable his work is here, how defiantly different it is from any other “romantic comedy” any studio is releasing, replete with handheld and natural lighting and sudden liberating stylistic flights of fancy. I could gape in awe at the editing by Leslie Jones, one of the team who cut Malick’s magnificent THE THIN RED LINE. Jones has helped Anderson create his shortest film, and together they’ve created poetry here. There’s a recurrent transition device, simple colors on screen with a blast of score and snippets of dialogue, that had a remarkable effect on me, and I’m still trying to figure out why. Normally, I sit in a theater and I watch the way something’s put together, and I can understand the choices all the way around. So often, I watch mainstream films and I’m bored by how predictable and safe the choices are across the board, and I am nearly rendered unconscious by the predictable nature of the storytelling. Everything is always overexplained in most commercial writing. Nothing is left to the viewer to determine or contribute. In this film, there are wonderful gaps in conventional logic that add up in an intuitive way for me, and it excites me so much that I have found myself sitting here at the keyboard a few times in the last week, preparing to write about the film, then stopping myself.
No, no, no, I say to myself. You can’t. Doesn’t matter that you’ve built up a body of work writing about this filmmaker and you’ve got things you want to say about the new work. Because of dumb random luck and studio deals made years apart and for unrelated reasons, you suddenly aren’t allowed, so don’t even think about it.
I can’t talk about Luis Guzman, who continues to build one of the coolest bodies of work as a character actor with his hilarious work here. His entire performance is about his eyes. He says everything with the way he watches Barry. He likes Barry, he fears Barry a little bit, he is puzzled by Barry, and above all, he has no idea what planet Barry is from. And I can’t talk about Mary Lynn Rasklub, passive-aggressive perfection as Barry’s sister who introduces him to Lena in the first place, or Philip Seymour Hoffman, who makes the most out of less than 40 lines of dialogue in the whole film.
I can’t talk about how Emily Watson may have her best role here since BREAKING THE WAVES, playing a perfect vision of healing love. I can’t talk about the way Anderson uses her soft womanly curves and her big blue cupie-doll eyes to such profound effect. I can't talk about how she takes hold of Barry, this clenched fist, and gradually peels back each finger, taking down those defenses of his, until he is an open palm, waiting for her to entwine herself in him. I can’t talk about the sheer bliss of the first kiss between these two or my theory that the harmonium represents Lena, and how Barry taking one of them in is a substitute for the other, and how we see him looking for some band-aid that is going to heal him, never realizing it might be a person and not a thing that he needs. I can’t talk about the precise way Anderson uses violence in this film, or the brilliant way he backs Barry into a series of corners, only to refuse us release in a few key places that really challenge the idea of what an audience is willing to take.
I can’t talk about any of it... so I guess I’ll just shut up.
I mean, I’d tell you the film is opening in all sorts of new markets this weekend, but even that would seem like some sort of improper endorsement. And I am nothing if not the very model of propriety. So even though I think PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE is unforgettable and crushing and as good as any movie released this year, you’re never going to get me to say that, no matter how hard you try. My lips are sealed.
"Moriarty" out.
