|
punch-drunk love
Two weeks ago or thereabouts I saw Punch-Drunk Love, the new P.T. Anderson movie, and I've been kind of turning it over in my head ever since.
My office-mate D., who hasn't yet seen it, asked me today whether I thought it was good. I don't know that I'd say good, exactly. It's bizarre.
I do think it works as an interesting exploration of genre. It is part romantic comedy and part California noir, two genres that don't sit easily with one another. And they're linked by a creature from another genre altogether: Adam Sandler, who plays a sedated yet recognizable version of his normal man-child.
All this genre-play pretty much rules out any sort of naturalism: Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum complains that he doesn't believe "in any of the characters on any level." But I'm a postmodernist, so that doesn't really bother me.
I'm more troubled by the misogyny that seems to percolate throughout the film: all of the women that Sandler's character encounters are caricatures, from his seven shrill, malicious sisters to the phone-sex operator who seeks to sink her claws into Sandler and gouge him for all that he's worth. Emily Watson, the film's "good" woman, has no more dimension than the "evil" ones: lacking any sort of demonstrable evidence of an interior life, she serves essentially as a cipher, a glowing beneficence that surrounds no core.
But then again maybe this is the point? Is it possible that the film is investigating misogyny rather than replicating it? Maybe we're seeing the women filtered through the consciousness of Sandler's socially-cloistered character—a consciousness which might be ill-equipped to do anything more than reduce women down into cartoons? It's worth noting that Anderson has shown great interest in exploring misogynist characters elsewhere, perhaps most particularly through the character of Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia.
Definitely worth seeing, and not as simple as it looks. Labels: media commentary |
Monday, November 11, 2002
3:15 PM
|
