Ray Pride

Paul Thomas Anderson may smoke too much.

The chain-smoking writer-director's fourth feature, "Punch-Drunk Love" is the most acute evocation of nicotine nerve-jangle I've every seen, ninety-seven minutes of anxiety in search of a lasting, deep drag.

Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) is another of Anderson's self-loathing SoCal curiosities. A distributor of housecleaning novelties, he lives with a constant state of dread. He repeats, "I'm a nice guy" when confronted, shying back like a cat to a corner, yet he acts out, beating up inanimate objects when he can't put words to feelings. A houseful of sisters (led by the insistent and wonderful Mary Lynn Rajskub) reminisce about how they used to humiliate him when he was small, and how he once threw a hammer through a window when they teased him as "Gayboy."

There's more plot complication, involving frequent-flyer miles, a discarded harmonium and pudding, and then the appearance of the too-good-to-be-true Lena Leonard as a possible romance. As Lena, Emily Watson is a bedeviled kewpie, glistering mad-blue marbles for eyes, all purr and pursed lips. There's a subplot involving a vengeful phone-sex entrepreneur (Philip Seymour Hoffman chewing profanity like sheets of glass). Story's not the heart of the picture, though. Settle into your seat, and something happens in the first couple of shots, a sudden burst of inexplicable mayhem, a sledding horizontal incitement that sets the tone for the picture to come.

From those first moments of "Punch-Drunk Love," you'll know you're in for an aggressive portrait of disconnection and externalized inner chaos that will either disturb or annoy the shit out of you. It's a comedy about OCD with OCD. For me, it's the 32-year-old director's best picture. Why? Because I can cite you a half-dozen influences or parallel bits of art and it still won't give you a clean picture of what Anderson does, not with Sandler's persona, but with Sandler himself. This performance is frightening, spot on, utterly haunted. Oscar? Don't laugh. Won't happen, but it's not unworthy.

Anderson's widescreen images (shot mostly with post-dusk grain by cinematographic co-conspirator Robert Elswit) posit Los Angeles as a quietly sad, almost mystical place, with an almost Tati-like grace, with the San Fernando Valley standing in for the hateful "modern" suburbs of Tati's 1958 "Mon Oncle." Jon Brion's assaultive percussion score resembles a passage of music from Tati's "Playtime." Sandler spends almost all of the picture in a dorky blue suit, reminiscent of Tati's Hulot character, tall and always kitted out in a khaki raincoat. Or is it Jerry Lewis, the spastic klutz in a stage costume? Anderson connives to be the surrealist of Sherman Oaks, less sociologist than spatial analyst. Shots comprised of silhouettes and shadow, with blinding light in background, a little past magic hour, as well as daylight shots of bleaching white light and geometric near-abstractions are reminiscent of painter Richard Diebenkorn's grids of light and surface. In deep night, the look is akin to that in Gregory Crewdson's photography, with bizarre, stylized light sources emanating from darkness. There's a 99¢ Store sequence straight out of photographer-panoramist Andreas Gursky's work; like Albert Brooks, Anderson makes use of sustained takes and sustained self-mortification. There's an astute comic use of objects abruptly entering and exiting the frame, a familiar tic in the work of Bill Forsyth ("Local Hero"). Intentional or not, these comparisons suggest the richness of the visual style, rather than the self-indulgence some reviewers have suggested.

Like Lars Trier's divide between his lustrous, anally precise pre-Dogme 95 and his showily gritty post-Dogme movies, Anderson dispenses with much of his Altmanesque gliding camera, except in scenes where the camera nudges, urges characters forward. There are intentional technical infelicities that hype the aggro, such as purposefully sloppy camerawork to the point of the camera bumping up against a character and soldiering on, with the sounds of scuffling represented as muffled poundings as if Sandler were hitting the microphone itself.

Amid the grandiloquent emotional distress, there's always Anderson's knack for cracked cadences, including the hilarious-in-context lines "Hang up again and you'll see the trouble you'll make"; "What's with the piano, what's with the pudding?"; and "Sir, I'm going to crack your fucking head open."

You don't need a plot synopsis for "Punch-Drunk Love," just curiosity. In a notorious interview with Patrick Goldstein in the L.A. Times after the release of "Boogie Nights," Francis Coppola offered Anderson a piece of advice. "This is the one moment when you have it, when you can do whatever you want to do," the unrepentant maverick director told him. "It's the one moment when you have a clean slate, with no stigma attached. And even if your next movie makes $400 million and gets eight Oscars, you'll still have to fight battles that you'll never have to fight right now. So whatever you want to do, do it now."

He's still doing it, God bless the scamp. Pass the pack.

"Punch-Drunk Love" opens Friday.

(2002-10-16)

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