Paul Thomas Anderson's strangest film. Adam Sandler as a romantic lead and the most-emotionally-direct work in PTA's catalogue.
Los Angeles, contemporary. Barry Egan is a small-business owner (a wholesale-novelty supplier of decorative plungers) whose life is dominated by his seven sisters and by a barely-contained internal anxiety that periodically explodes into rage. He develops two parallel plots in the same week: he calls a phone-sex line one lonely night, then is targeted by the line's operators in an extortion attempt; he meets Lena Leonard, a friend of one of his sisters, and begins a tentative romance with her.
The film tracks Barry across approximately a week. He flies to Hawaii to meet Lena. He confronts the phone-sex extortion operation. The Hawaii sequence and the climactic Provo, Utah confrontation are structurally connected; both depict Barry stepping out of the corner of his own life that the anxiety has constrained him to. The film closes on Barry and Lena in the warehouse with the wholesale plungers, in a small private scene of quiet affection.
Adam Sandler had, by 2002, established himself as a commercial comedy star with films like Happy Gilmore, Big Daddy, and Mr. Deeds. Punch-Drunk Love was the first sustained dramatic role in his career. The role is, in some sense, an extension of Sandler's broader comic persona — the suppressed-rage register, the inappropriately-loud outbursts, the specific physical comportment — but recontextualised as dramatic material rather than as comedy.
The performance has been argued about. Critics on one side argue that the role is the strongest dramatic work of Sandler's career; the case for him as a serious actor depends on Punch-Drunk Love more than on any of his subsequent dramatic work (Uncut Gems in 2019 is the closest comparison). Critics on the other side argue that Sandler is essentially playing his comic persona without modification; the dramatic context does the work the performance itself doesn't. Both readings have textual support.
Jon Brion's score is one of the most-unconventional in early-2000s American cinema. The score is built on percussion, harmonium, and assorted small instruments rather than on orchestral arrangement. The recurring sound texture is, in some sense, the audible representation of Barry's interior state — barely-controlled, intermittently dissonant, occasionally beautiful.
Brion has worked with Anderson on multiple films. The Punch-Drunk Love score is, by survey of working composers, one of his most-distinctive achievements. The score has been imitated extensively across subsequent indie-cinema scoring; the small-instruments-as-emotional-register approach is now a recognisable convention in American independent film music, largely downstream of Brion's work here.
Punch-Drunk Love is 95 minutes — significantly shorter than Paul Thomas Anderson's other major work. The runtime constraint is structurally important. The film's specific tonal register — the controlled-explosion energy, the abrupt comedic-to-dramatic shifts, the quiet ending — is sustained partly because the film does not extend beyond its sustainable length. A longer film would have required more conventional plot mechanics; the 95-minute version can operate as a pure tonal experiment.
Anderson has spoken about the film as a deliberate departure from his earlier ensemble work (Boogie Nights, Magnolia). After two ambitious three-hour ensemble pieces, he chose to make a small intimate film with two leads and minimal plot machinery. The choice produces one of the most-distinctive films in his catalogue — the one most-different from his other work and, in some critical readings, the one most-emotionally-direct.