“And now, the nominees for Best Performance by a comedy actor playing a serious role to prove he’s a real actor!” -that one Hollywood Entertainment Awards announcer from Dog With A Blog
….Okay, maybe using a quote like that is a little mean, but it is true that Adam Sandler has mainly done comedy movies throughout his acting career. I happened to watch the first of these comedy movies, “Going Overboard”, earlier this year, and I absolutely hated it. Honestly, that’s the consensus with most of the comedy movies he’s starred in; they’re not very well-received, with some even winning Raspberry Awards. (Looking at you specifically, Jack and Jill.) What about the more dramatic movies he’s starred in, though? For example, Punch-Drunk Love. This movie is probably one of the most well-received movies that Adam Sandler has starred in, even though it was apparently a box office bomb, and it’s not even really a comedy (though Wikipedia says that it’s a comedy-drama). I’d been wanting to watch it since I’d heard of it, despite this being after I’d been burned by Going Overboard, and now that I’ve finally gotten around to it, I can say that I can simultaneously understand why it was well-received by critics and why it bombed at the box office.
Adam Sandler’s role in Punch-Drunk Love is that of Barry Egan, an entrepreneur who sells novelty toiletry items. He’s a socially anxious and lonely man prone to angry outbursts, which isn’t helped by the fact that he has seven sisters who constantly treat him like crap. He ends up calling a phone sex line just to have someone to talk to, but everything starts to go awry when the operator calls him the next morning to demand $750 out of him. Around this time, Barry meets Lena Leonard, a coworker of one of his sisters’ who is fascinated with him at first sight. From there, they start to build a relationship, which marks the start of Barry gaining more confidence in himself….which is going to be necessary when the whole phone sex line extortion situation starts to get even worse than it was.
Something I’ve heard from a few other reviews of Punch-Drunk Love before I watched it is that Barry is autistic-coded, and as someone on the spectrum myself, I can somewhat see it. His social awkwardness and low self-confidence may have to do with his sisters constantly ridiculing him (which we will get to later), yet in the scene where Barry is giving his personal information to the receptionist of the phone sex line, I kind of thought that that was something I’d do if I hadn’t learned from the one time someone tried to scam me (and also was into the whole phone sex thing); I wouldn’t have been able to pick up that something was definitely wrong there. Well, whether or not Barry’s autistic, I have to give Adam Sandler praise for his performance here. Barry is a different type of character from what he normally plays, yet Sandler perfectly embodies the mannerisms that this kind of character would have.
As for the other actors, they all do a good job, although I’m a little mixed on the characters themselves. Emily Watson did a pretty good job as Lena, and she and Sandler have decent chemistry; I just wish that her character was utilized more in the movie, as she didn’t feel like much more than just the love interest. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the main antagonist of the movie, and he demonstrated an intimidating presence in quite a few scenes, which I appreciated. Speaking of intimidating, I have to give some props to Ashley Clark, who played the phone sex line receptionist; she did an excellent job at sounding sexy and genuinely terrifying when she needed to. Lastly, I wanted to mention Mary Lynn Rajskub, who plays one of Barry’s sisters, Elizabeth. I found her to be quite annoying, which I’m pretty sure was supposed to be the point, so I guess I can say she did a good job, too.
I may have said that Mary Lynn Rajskub did a good job as Elizabeth, but that doesn’t mean I liked her as a character. In fact, although the rest of the sisters didn’t appear throughout the movie frequently, I hated all of them and was annoyed every time they were on screen. Again, though, that was supposed to be the point. What I do have a genuine problem with, though, was that Punch-Drunk Love, despite supposedly being a romantic comedy-drama, wasn’t exactly funny, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Maybe it’s just my own sense of humor, but I just couldn’t see what the jokes in this romantic comedy-drama were supposed to be. There was one scene in Going Overboard that made me somewhat chuckle, which was more than I laughed here, which is not a favorable comparison if you remembered what opinion I expressed for Going Overboard earlier in this review.
What Punch-Drunk Love lacks in comedy, though, it makes up for with its compelling story. It’s so fascinating to see how Barry and Lena come together, as well as how Barry’s situation escalates the way it does. The background music also elevates each scene; Jon Brion’s score was very beautiful. There is also a scene that features Shelley Duvall’s “He Needs Me”, which was an excellent fit, given how Barry and Lena’s relationship was at that point. If there’s one problem I have with how the film’s story was told, it’s how the phone sex line situation gets resolved toward the end; given how there were some action scenes related to this prior to this scene, the fact that this is the way it was resolved felt a little anticlimactic. Well, at least Adam Sandler was able to deliver a really powerful monologue there.
Overall, Punch-Drunk Love is probably the best Adam Sandler movie I’ve seen so far, although it’s not perfect; I feel like the fact that it’s less of a comedy was at least a contributing factor to it bombing in the box office. If you want to see a different kind of acting performance from what you’ve seen from his movies or just want a good romantic film, I’d recommend you to check it out. Maybe it’ll become a love in your life….well, as much as one can reasonably love a movie, anyway.
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