by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

The best line in Punch-Drunk Love doesn't sound profound or even make much sense out of context, which means it's merely a perfect piece of writing and acting rather than something you could stitch into a throw pillow. Adam Sandler's character Barry is leaving a woman's apartment after ending their date with an awkward "Okay. Have a good trip. Bye-bye." Walking away, he furiously lays into himself, mumbling, "And bye-bye. And bye-bye. Fuckin' and bye-bye. You stupid motherfucker."

In this film, Barry also tears apart a restaurant bathroom, discovers a loophole in a food promotion that essentially gives him unlimited air travel for life and demolishes four hired goons with a tire iron. He does not do relatable things, but he is a relatable character. I don't know if I've ever responded to a film moment in the specific way I still respond to Barry regretting the slightly silly thing he said to a person he cares about.

Punch-Drunk Love is the film that made people realize Sandler can act, to the point that it's the only thing anybody says about this movie. In the greater world, it's less a movie and more a caveat–"I don't like Adam Sandler movies, but I love Punch-Drunk Love”–like Sandler is country music and Punch-Drunk Love is Johnny Cash. Nobody says the same for Mark Wahlberg and Boogie Nights, even though God's Favorite Wahlberg has been in less than six movies you'd watch if they popped up on cable right now.

Make no mistake: Sandler is the best thing about this great movie. I just wish we all thought of it as "the movie where Adam Sandler and Emily Watson are great together," or "the one where Philip Seymour Hoffman plays perhaps his worst, sleaziest character with the most fitting hair anybody has ever had." Sandler is spectacular, but writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson made a film where everything and everybody is spectacular. It's almost reductive to talk about any of this story's strengths without recapping all 95 minutes.

The only difficult way to discuss Punch-Drunk Love is as a flop. It underperformed, but the film didn't set anybody's career back or keep similar movies from being made in the future. New Line released the second Lord of the Rings that year, and the studio was fine. Nobody got Ishtar'd by this one. In fact, Paul Thomas Anderson has made five films since Punch-Drunk Love came out in 2002, and three of them (The Master, Inherent Vice and Licorice Pizza) lost significantly more money against similar budgets.

The Internet says this movie had a budget of $25 million, which is roughly equivalent to the lighting budget for the reshoots of a big Hollywood blockbuster. Boogie Nights cost $15 million, so Anderson clearly knew how to stretch a dollar: $25 million isn't extravagant by any means. The film Sandler starred in before Punch-Drunk Love (Little Nicky) cost $85 million to make and the one after (Mr. Deeds) cost $50 million. This is not Cutthroat Island. This is not The Postman. Somebody lost money on Punch-Drunk Love, but I can't for the life of me imagine anybody felt bad about their decision to be part of something so good.

The money behind a work of art shouldn't mean anything to you and me, but how would you armchair quarterback this film's production with twenty years of hindsight? What would you change to make it a success?

We've already established that I think Sandler is irreplaceable, and he's clearly the actor with the highest salary. The story is lean, mostly taking place in homes and a warehouse in Los Angeles. You could cut the trip to Hawaii, surely a significant expense, but then you'd lose all of the beautiful visual juxtaposition between Oahu's beaches and the dimly lit, bland apartment Barry lives in on the mainland. You'd lose those colors, those crowd shots, the breathing room.

Marketing-wise, I don't know. Maybe you trick people by editing the trailers and poster to convince potential audiences you're giving them another Big Daddy. Or you go the other way: de-emphasize the film's primary character and pretend Anderson didn't hire a guy the arthouse crowd might turn their noses up at. I don't know if that gives you a smash as much as it makes people angry. It's a particular film. You can't do much to identify it as something it isn't.

I think Punch-Drunk Love always was going to have a disappointing box office gross. I don't think anybody dropped the ball at any point in its creation and presentation. These things happen. But you can't show me a single person who hates this movie. Flops matter to studio executives worried about their bonuses. We just get art.

There's another line I think about a lot, and you could put this on a pillow or type it out in a nice font and get some Instagram likes by sharing it. Total genius Robert Smigel, playing the husband of one of Barry's overbearing sisters, shares a brief, private scene with Sandler. "I wanted to ask you something because you're a doctor," Barry says, stumbling toward what's clearly an important question he's had at the front of his mind for a while. "I don't like myself sometimes. Can you help me?"

"Barry," Smigel's character says, "I'm a dentist. What help do you think I could give you?"

They go back and forth, and Smigel's character asks if something is wrong. Barry says, "I don't know if there is anything wrong because I don't know how other people are." Everything Barry does is either an attempt to be like other people or a caustic lashing out because he doesn't think he can ever succeed at that. 

The real problem with a movie like Punch-Drunk Love flopping is that more people could use it in their lives. There are people who wouldn't like the color forms and the harmonium in the score. There are people who wouldn't care that the least Robert Altman-inspired movie Paul Thomas Anderson made up to that point features the Harry Nilsson-written, Shelley Duvall-sung song "He Needs Me," which comes from Popeye, an atypical film in Altman's filmography. If I want any movie to reach more people, it isn't because I want my taste to colonize their minds. In this case, it's because Punch-Drunk Love articulates a kind of loneliness, self-hatred and defeatism that many people feel, and it shifts all of that into a romance and warmth that we could all use. When movies like Punch-Drunk Love flop, they don't take down studios or genres or actors, but they do have their impact limited, and I would do anything to live in a world where this film has a bigger impact.