FOR SOME DEPRESSING NEWS on the continuing struggle between art and commerce, consider this: Paul Thomas Anderson’s first three movies made–in their combined total box office gross–less than “Tomb Raider” made in its first 60 hours of release.
These movies of Anderson’s, mind you, were not small art-house fare: They featured actors such as Tom Cruise, Mark Wahlberg, Gwyneth Paltrow, Thomas Jane, Julianne Moore, Heather Graham, Samuel L. Jackson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Philip Baker Hall. They had mid-sized budgets and two of them had meaningful promotional backing from their studio. Yet, for some reason, moviegoers rejected them.
Which is a shame, because Anderson’s first three movies, “Hard Eight” (1996), “Boogie Nights” (1997), and “Magnolia” (1999), are all gems. And it is clear that Anderson, who writes and directs his movies, is the great filmmaker of his generation. So one of the impressive things about Anderson’s latest effort, “Punch-Drunk Love,” is that, despite all of the rejection, he’s still in love with moviemaking.
“Punch-Drunk Love” is a romantic comedy of sorts. Adam Sandler plays Barry Egan, a nervous, gun-shy, but altogether pleasant small business owner. Barry has seven sisters who have bossed, insulted, and dominated him since childhood, rendering him incapable of saying “no” to anyone and incredibly skittish around women. Then Barry meets one of his sisters’ friends, Lena (Emily Watson). Through a series of events involving phone sex, pudding, Hawaii, and a harmonium, they fall in love.
Like all of Anderson’s movies, “Punch-Drunk Love” is full of great stuff. Anderson continues to coax astounding performances out of unlikely actors (Heather Graham, Burt Reynolds, and Mark Wahlberg gave startlingly serious, nuanced performances in “Boogie Nights,” to the complete surprise of everyone, and whatever you think of Gwyneth Paltrow, she has never been as good as she was in “Hard Eight”). Here the surprise is Adam Sandler, who is deft and accessible, but never shticky.
Again, Anderson’s use of music is striking. The soundtrack to “Boogie Nights” used pop hits from the ’70s and ’80s to ground the movie and help the film’s temporal flow. “Magnolia” took Aimee Mann’s sharply-written work and used her voice as the movie’s Greek chorus. In the beginning of “Punch-Drunk Love,” Barry is followed by a jolting, nervous soundtrack made up only of percussion. As he comes into his own, a colorful, layered, spontaneous melody gradually emerges.
And like Anderson’s other movies, “Punch-Drunk Love” has the feeling of impending darkness throughout: Barry is stalked and mugged; he and Lena are involved in a violent car crash; and he has a scrotum-tightening encounter with a menacing thug. Yet at each moment, just as you fear that Anderson is about to visit tragedy upon his players, he pulls back. The clouds recede and the sun pokes through. And it isn’t until the end that you realize Anderson isn’t using “True Romance” or “Bonnie and Clyde” as his template: He’s actually making a screwball comedy.
“Punch-Drunk Love” isn’t an epic masterpiece, like “Boogie Nights,” or a risky, solemn meditation, like “Magnolia” (which is, I’ve argued, the most deeply religious movie made by Hollywood in recent memory). Instead, like “Hard Eight,” it’s a scary-looking movie with sweetness at its core.
This sweetness has become Anderson’s trademark. He gives us characters we can root for, despite their flaws (unlike Altman or Stone or Kubrick). And then he gives us a moral framework. In P.T. Anderson productions, the righteous are saved and the wicked are punished: Dirk Diggler is embraced after he gives up drugs, while the Colonel goes to jail for his pedophilia; John and Clementine run off to be married, but the vicious, blackmailing Jimmy is gunned down; every character in “Magnolia” is saved from their self-destructions–by a rain of frogs!–except for the child molester, Jimmy Gator, who is burned alive.
It’s difficult to overestimate how hard it must be for a serious artist in today’s Hollywood to make morality plays like Anderson’s. If you aspire to artistic stature, your movies are supposed to be dark and full of anti-heroes, the way Coppola and Co.’s were in the ’70s, and the people who do make happily-ever-after movies are mostly commercial hacks selling sentimentality. To exist between these two worlds without being sucked into either is quite a trick.
So what is it that keeps Anderson’s sunny side up? One supposes it’s either deep religious and moral conviction or a stupendous love affair with moviemaking. Hollywood being what it is, my money is on the latter, and, truth be told, it doesn’t much matter–the work is the work–except for this: If Anderson simply loves making movies, and if his brilliant movies are continually rejected by audiences, at some point he will sour.
It has happened before (John Sayles is Exhibit A), and if it happens to Anderson, it will be a great loss.
Which brings us back to the beginning. Why doesn’t the public rush to embrace Paul Thomas Anderson? Why won’t they run by the gaggle to see the sweet, charming, effervescent “Punch-Drunk Love”? (You should.)
Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard.
