By Recommended Re-Viewing is a series in which we make the case for re-watching an old film or TV series which you can stream without leaving your house. It might be a plot that's so bad it's good, a scene which deserves more interrogation or a director's underrated gem.
Here Esquire's senior writer Olivia Ovenden looks at 'Punch-Drunk Love', a glorious (unofficial) prequel to 'Uncut Gems'.
Before Uncut Gem's Howard Ratner there was Barry Egan, the awkward underdog hero of Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love and a role which proved that Adam Sandler could be magnetic and frustrating, heartbreakingly tender and riotously funny.
Anyone who had seen the 2002 film was probably surprised when Sandler started to earn award season buzz last year, already aware what he could do when playing an on the edge outsider.
Sandler's character Barry Egan is a toilet plunger salesman whose seven obnoxious sisters torment him, his life alternating between social anxiety and bursts of anger. It is a surreal, hallucinatory film of dark silhouettes and kaleidoscopic colour patterns where cars flip over and then disappear. Philip Seymour Hoffman is gloriously repellent as Dean Trumbell, a Utah mattress salesman, who screams down the phone to Barry in one brilliant scene.
Punch-Drunk Love is a twisted almost love story, Egan meets Lena (a brilliant Emily Watson) and you feel moved that a lonely man who collects yoghurt tokens to save up for air miles has found someone, but he can't help fucking it up. It's car crash in slow-motion in a palette of indigo blue, where you can follow a line as devastating as "I don't like myself sometimes, can you help me?" with "Barry, I'm a dentist."
Uncut Gems directors the Safdie brothers have discussed how Anderson's filmography, and this film in particular, influenced their own work, sharing a series of GIFS of Sandler as Barry Egan on Thanksgiving last year as an amusing commentary on dysfunctional families.
But despite winning Anderson the Cannes Film Festival prize for best director in 2002, Punch-Drunk Love is one of his less popular works compared to the likes of Boogie Nights or There Will Be Blood. There is an unsettling energy to Punch-Drunk Love, like Uncut Gems it can feel unbearable to watch; a sense of unease at why you're laughing at something going so desperately wrong.
It isn't an earlier draft of Uncut Gems, it's something so bizarrely unique and unnerving that it puts you on the edge of your seat. Seeing it makes you realise that Sandler's comedy years weren't a result of him trying to get better: the goods were there all along.
