Punch-Drunk Love (2002 film) = Finished

I saw Punch-Drunk Love when I was younger. Three years ago, if Twitter is to be believed.

At the time, I thought it was a good movie!
Inexplicably strange guy finds understanding woman and falls in love. Powerful, sometimes dreamy imagery supporting a simple story. Artful, quiet, neat.

Younger me was an absolute idiot--and unwittingly proved, single-handed, that rewatching movies is essential for me going forward.
If I just considered Punch-Drunk Love 'finished', I wouldn't have had one of the most powerful media experiences of my life last night.
I didn't get Punch-Drunk Love back then, and I can only realize that in hindsight, by getting it now.

Punch-Drunk Love is the most eloquent expression of loneliness I have ever seen in a creative work.

It's easy to set someone apart, visually and narratively, to communicate that they're alone. Isolation by standard. We've all seen this image. The kid behind the blue light of the computer screen or the teenage wallflower. However, what Punch-Drunk Love understands on a fundamental level, is that true loneliness is best exposed and expressed around other people. This deep, wrenching loneliness, this soul-tide that alternately cools and burns, doesn't go away around others. It hangs around your heart like a weight. 

You can have meaningful relationships with colleagues, friends, and family.
You can smile, even laugh.  
You can be surrounded by people you love and who love you.
...and still feel absolutely alone.

Punch-Drunk Love examines this soul loneliness from the perspective of Adam Sandler's character, Barry. Barry is strange. He lies, he's socially awkward, he has violent temper flare-ups...He's crying out for help in a lot of ways, but is perfectly functional as a human being, so people don't recognize that pain. If you have never experienced all-pervading, aching loneliness, you just don't get it, and the family's insensitive attitude towards Barry's mental health struggles reflect that reality. When the inner loneliness breaks out, it can get ugly. Otherwise though, Barry just works, and exists, so folks ignore him. That's all he can do.

That's our first story.

Lena is the new person in Barry's life. She's interested in him, and treats him with a sensitivity his family lacks. When I was younger, I thought this was simply the trope of the manic pixie dream girl--a seemingly perfect woman enters a self-centered guy's life and fixes it, ignoring his problems and lack of support for her along the way. This time around though, I was paying closer attention. I saw Lena walk away after lying to Barry, catch herself, and decide to go back voice her true intentions with an understated series of movements. I saw Lena close her eyes when Barry hugs her, pulling him closer with her nails. The glances, the tics, the little looks--Lena isn't a prop to lift up Barry's story, or even lift up Barry himself, after all.

It turns out Lena is just deeply, truly lonely too.

She feels this overwhelming thing every day of her life, and in Barry, she believes she's found someone else that shares her pain.

That's our second story.

Punch-Drunk Love takes these two stories--these two people existing in a haze--and mashes them together in a display of mundane, characterful fantasy. Over an hour into the movie, Barry doesn't lie to an uncomfortable question for the first time, and the camera holds on his face for a full ten seconds to appreciate that fact. The day Lena meets Barry, he takes a harmonium off the street into his office, which visually signals his first steps towards even opening his life.

Loneliness is hard. You can build up a lot of responses and behaviors to close yourself off, numb the pain. However, we get to see two people make constant, intentional choices to open themselves, and in the process, fill the voids in each other that both had doubted would ever be whole.

Did you know we don't see Barry and Lena have sex?
It happens at one point, but we don't see it. In a romantic comedy, the moment of HEEDLESSLY GIVING INTO PASSION is what we're typically rooting for, right?  We don't see our main characters bang away in Punch-Drunk Love because that isn't the point. This isn't a story about a physical fulfillment. It's about an emotional one.  

THERE IS SO MUCH GOING ON IN THIS DAMN MOVIE

The setting of boundaries, the displays of passion, the way these two weird, lonely people get each other on a level that leaves even the audience left out...I believe this movie is untouched in its technique. This is powerful, strange, and (importantly) healthy romance, on a scale Hollywood doesn't even want to approach. Healthy, strange, unrelatable, no skin? It doesn't sell within the pattern of problematic relationships that are paraded in front of us every day.

It's a fucking shame.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson, up to this point, directed epics. We're talking almost three-hour films, if not more. Presented the canvas of a 90 minute film, he drills every second of it with expertise that is hard to appreciate unless you recognize how far off the beaten path he's going, and how seemingly effortlessly he takes you with him.

This is a heavy movie in a bite-size package, and I cannot help but reel in the face of this Punch-Drunk Love.