15 Years of the ‘Punch Drunk Love’ Soundtrack
How Jon Brion’s avant garde score masks (and accentuates) Adam Sandler’s inner turmoil
“I think what you actually want is the thing to feel like a musical, but nobody ever breaks into song,” Jon Brion recounted once saying to PT Anderson. That “thing” would eventually be Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, the 2002 film that, among other things, proved Adam Sandler to be a fantastic solemn lead actor. “Exactly!” Anderson said back to Brion. Together in that moment, they uncovered that the film’s spirit would be anti-musical.
Brion co-scored Anderson’s debut feature Hard Eight with composer Michael Penn, who subsequently scored all of Boogie Nights; but Brion returned to take on Magnolia in its entirety, which then led to Punch-Drunk Love. In the years between the latter two films, Brion collaborated with Fiona Apple — Anderson’s partner at the time — on her classic albums When The Pawn Hits and Fantastic Machine. Already well established as a composer, Brion had a distinctive sound conducive to the styles of both artists: sharp texture done playful; jazzy pop done surreal. The choruses for Apple’s “Paper Bag,” for example, swirl into sumptuous, Disney-esque territory but are inevitably contrasted by a minor chord resolution in the verses. Such sardonicism in the song’s instrumentation reflects that of its lyrics, about the delusion in anorexia: “Hunger hurts but starving works.”
That sardonicism is expanded to grander proportions in Punch-Drunk Love. The scintillating technicolor of Robert Elswit’s cinematography is an homage to the old MGM musicals Anderson had been watching. Bright reds, pinks, and blues melt into each other during abstract segues — which, although not a convention of Hollywood musical films, reinforce the technicolor aspect. In addition there’s a lot of California and Hawaii scenes going on. And Barry Egan (played by Sandler) is always wearing his solid blue suit.
“He Needs Me” is the soundtrack’s center-piece. Originally written by Harry Nilsson and sung by Shelley Duvall in the 1980 Popeye musical, Brion remixed and added new orchestration behind Duvall. The song appears while Egan is on the phone in Hawaii amidst the clamor of a parade, asking his sister for her friend Lena’s number (Emily Watson), Egan’s love interest. “What do you want her number for? Why? Tell me why,” she goes. “There’s no reason for you to treat me this way,” says Egan, “you’re killing me.” She fails to grasp his seriousness and goes on teasing him — until he erupts. “Give me the fucking number! You hear me?! I’m sick of this shit!” Finally she capitulates.
The combination of visuals and music cynically overshadow the inner turmoil of Egan. Throughout the movie he’s anxious and repressing rage against his sisters and their ongoing harassment. But as he finally unleashes that rage, it’s the quaint and hopeful strings of “He Needs Me” that play behind him. The scene is framed as triumphant — a characteristic that’s compounded by the song’s role in concluding the film — though the semblance of this triumph is quite discomfiting.
Aside from functioning as a device for contrast, Brion’s music and its energy are complementary to some scenes as well. Anderson planned his long-shots with rhythm in mind, rather than actual melodies; for him, the visual movement was percussive. On set Anderson beatboxed for Brion, into his microcassette recorder, specific rhythms for specific scenes. Instead of a drumset or traditional percussion, Brion chose to orchestrate Anderson’s rhythms with something called prepared piano: By sticking various objects into a grand piano to stunt notes from ringing out, he could play rhythms that were simultaneously percussive and just ever so slightly melodic. His prepared piano heightened the level of excitement in otherwise ordinary scenes— Egan pacing around his workplace, or binging on pudding at the supermarket.
While morosity is embodied half by instrumentation and the other half by lyricism in Fiona Apple’s music, Sandler’s character fully embodies that quality in Punch-Drunk Love. The soundtrack itself never goes morose, instead it’s always conveying either anticipation or elation. Yet how it contrasts some scenes has a more emotionally confounding effect, and better accentuates Egan’s turmoil, than how it might’ve been made to complement them. Alongside Anderson, Jon Brion succeeded at pure musical emotion. Further than that, he succeeded at reshaping and repositioning emotion in the most unexpected ways.
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BONUS! Tribeca Shortlist sat down with Taika Waititi (writer/director/star: Boy, What We Do in the Shadows) and asked him for hand-picked movie recommendations. He included Punch-Drunk Love on his Shortlist, find out why below:
