The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Paul Thomas Anderson · a film · 2002 · about 95 minutes · music by Jon Brion · colour interludes by Jeremy Blake
Mode
Romantic comedy turned into a study of panic; a quest romance, a family comedy and an extortion plot on one line
Mythos
The despised knight who crosses the sea to find the lady and faces the ogre in his own hall; the gift from nowhere at dawn; the holy fool and the beast loved before he is tamed
Phase
From a dawn on an empty street to a harmonium in a warehouse, by way of a sister’s party, Honolulu and Provo, Utah
Presentation
Feature film, about 95 minutes, in English, shot on 35mm in anamorphic widescreen at 2.39:1; photography by Robert Elswit, editing by Leslie Jones, music by Jon Brion, colour interludes by Jeremy Blake
Register
Slapstick and menace in one key; long empty frames, phones that ring like alarms, a percussive score that rises with panic and settles on a pump organ
Scale
One man, seven sisters and a brother-in-law, a woman, a small business, a phone line and the brothers it sends
Governing Proposition
A man who sells novelty plungers from a warehouse, a man with seven sisters, is shamed into silence and breaks things when the silence fails; he falls in love, is extorted over a phone call, and ends by walking into a stranger’s shop in Utah to end the threat. The wager of the film is that rage and tenderness in such a man are one pressure, that love does not cure the violence but gives it a direction, and that a romantic comedy built around a star’s comic persona can carry that knowledge if its sound, frame and colour are made to feel the world as he feels it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins at dawn, on an empty street. Without warning a car flips over and crashes. Then a harmonium is set down at the curb and left there. A woman, Lena Leonard, played by Emily Watson, comes to leave her car. Barry Egan, played by Adam Sandler, in a blue suit, carries the harmonium inside before he knows what it is. A mundane morning has become an annunciation, and an instrument has arrived before the man who will play it.
Barry runs a small business from a warehouse, selling novelty plungers, with Lance, played by Luis Guzmán, beside him through the morning routine. The anamorphic frame sets him small in large empty spaces, and the phones ring like alarms. In a supermarket he finds a promotion on pudding that pays in air miles, and he sees in it a loophole: a man who cannot act on the world has found a way to make it pay him. The film plays the discovery as a quirk, and it is the plan by which the ending will be reached.
Paul Thomas Anderson wrote and directed the film, with Robert Elswit’s photography, Leslie Jones’s editing, a score by Jon Brion and abstract colour interludes by the artist Jeremy Blake; its producers include JoAnne Sellar and Daniel Lupi. It runs about 95 minutes, in English, shot on 35mm in anamorphic widescreen at 2.39:1. It premiered at Cannes in May 2002, where Anderson shared the prize for Best Director, and was released in the United States that October. It came after Magnolia, three hours long, and it is a fifth of that length.
Movement II
Barry has seven sisters. One of them, Elizabeth, is played by Mary Lynn Rajskub. At a party at a sister’s house they tease him as they always have, with an old nickname and the story of a hammer he once put through a window. The teasing is affectionate, and it is lethal, and Barry kicks out the glass doors.
The outburst is the comic persona Sandler had built through the 1990s, the man-child whose rage erupts for laughs, and the film will not laugh at it. It is played as a symptom: the shame that silences him has nowhere to go but out through his body. A scene with his brother-in-law, a dentist, shows the same wound from another side. The sisters are the origin of it, a chorus whose every line is love and injury at once.
Brion’s score keeps the viewer uneasy through all of this, clattering percussion where a romantic comedy would put a melody. The colour interludes come between the passages, pure colour and tone where the feeling outruns what the story can say. Lena, whom the film brings into this life, is given almost no inner life of her own; it does not try to know her as it knows him.
Movement III
Alone, Barry calls a phone-sex line. The call becomes an extortion, run from a mattress store in Provo, Utah, by a man named Dean Trumbell, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose voice on the phone climbs to screaming. Barry’s shame has become a debt, and the debt sends four brothers after him.
Barry and Lena go on a first date. In the middle of it he leaves the table and wrecks the restaurant’s restroom, and then comes back to the table as if nothing has happened. The same body that kicked out the glass doors is now in love, and nothing yet has given the force a direction. The film does not ask the audience to forgive him, and it does not ask Lena to explain why she stays.
Meanwhile he goes on buying pudding, filling cart after cart in the supermarket aisles. The supermarket is a field of noise, the warehouse a cave of clatter, and the dread rises with the calls from Provo. The film’s world is the world as an anxious man hears it, and its frame, sound and colour are made to carry that hearing. Told with stable sound and centred frames, the same events would be a plot about a shy man.
Movement IV
Lena is in Honolulu, and Barry flies across the sea to find her. It is the knight’s journey from the old romance, made by a man who sells plungers and is afraid of telephones, and the film keeps both in view without irony. He finds her, and the film rises with him.
The summit is an embrace in silhouette in a hotel archway, figures passing between the lovers and the camera, held against the light. On the soundtrack is “He Needs Me”, the song Harry Nilsson wrote for Robert Altman’s Popeye (1980), where Shelley Duvall sang it. Leslie Jones lets the shot hold. It is the film’s one long release.
They come home. In a car park the brothers from Utah ram them, and Barry fights all four with a tire iron and beats them. The body that broke glass doors and a restroom, once loved, now breaks men for someone. Love has not cured the violence; it has given it a direction. The film presents that direction as redemption, and it is the point at which its knowledge and its endorsement are hardest to tell apart.
Movement V
Barry drives to Provo and walks into the mattress store. The ogre in his hall is a small man behind a counter, and the descent to his place is played as comedy. Barry faces him, and Dean collapses from screaming to surrender. The extortion ends because the man it was meant to frighten has stopped being afraid. The film permits this ease and does not earn all of it.
He goes to Lena’s door and confesses. The pudding has done its work. The miles it earned are what he offers her, to go wherever she goes, and the loophole a powerless man found in a supermarket promotion has become the means of a life with someone else in it.
The coda is at the harmonium. Barry plays it, the instrument that arrived at dawn before he could, and Lena comes up behind him: “So here we go.” Twenty-four years on, the film survives whole, and its questions remain open: whether the violence is cured or only aimed, what the harmonium is, why she chooses him. Its line runs into later films that set a comic star in a register of panic. What it has made is a romance in which love and terror arrive in the same body, and are allowed to stay there.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the theatrical cut, about 95 minutes, and the cut is lean. The major elements resist the subtractive test. The harmonium left at the curb in the first minutes becomes Barry’s instrument and the last image. The pudding promotion, which looks like a quirk, is how a man who cannot act on the world finds a loophole in it, and its miles are what he offers Lena at the end. The phone-sex call becomes the extortion, and the extortion turns rage into courage at Provo. What holds the axis near its cap is what gives between them: the four brothers from Utah are a genre engine, run twice to similar effect, and the scene with the dentist brother-in-law restates the party.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: in a man whom shame has made inarticulate, rage and tenderness are one pressure, and love does not cure the violence but directs it. The body that kicks out a sister’s glass doors and wrecks a restaurant restroom, once loved, beats four men with a tire iron. The family as a chorus, teasing that is affectionate and lethal at once, is a second truth, and the world as an anxious man hears it, given in sound and image, counts in full. What holds the axis low is that the central disclosure is close to a mood, panic and release, more than a meaning; that Lena, through whom it is proved, has almost no inner life; and that the violence is presented as redemptive in direction and not weighed.
Score: 7.1 / 10
Elevation comes in two kinds, the ecstatic and the dreadful. The dawn prologue is the first: a car flips over on an empty street, then a harmonium is set down at the curb, and a mundane morning becomes an annunciation. Blake’s colour interludes lift the film out of narrative into pure colour and tone. The summit is Honolulu, the embrace held in silhouette in a hotel archway with “He Needs Me” on the soundtrack. The dread is the supermarket and the warehouse under Brion’s percussion, and Dean’s calls rising to screaming. The axis stands at the middle of its range because the height is gathered at three points, the prologue, Hawaii and the ending, and the stretches between, the pudding errands and the brothers’ attacks, are played level and comic.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The patterns are there, and the romance follows the shape of a quest: the knight, despised at home, crosses the sea to find the lady, is wounded, faces the ogre in his own hall and comes back to be accepted. The harmonium is a gift from nowhere at dawn, an instrument that arrives before the man can play it, as grace does. Barry is the holy fool and the beast loved before he is tamed, and Provo is the descent to the ogre’s place, played as comedy: the giant is a small man in a mattress store. What holds the axis lowest of the governed eleven is that the myth is evoked through tone, form and colour more than built into the world, is lightly carried, and does not deepen as the film goes on.
Score: 6.9 / 10
The inheritance is double. The romantic comedy, from screwball to the musical: the film borrows from Popeye (1980), and its movement and music are choreographed as a musical’s. And the comic persona Adam Sandler had built through the 1990s, the man-child whose rage erupts for laughs. The turn takes that persona whole and plays it straight: the outbursts become symptoms, the comedy anxiety, the romance scored as panic, with abstract art and a percussive score set inside a love story. The stake was real: after Magnolia (1999), three hours long, a film of 95 minutes with a mainstream comic star. Held well below the gate because the turn is taken inside a form that stays a romance and resolves happily, on a path the art-film romance had already opened in its decade.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows, which is how the world feels to Barry. The anamorphic frame sets him small in large empty spaces: the warehouse, long corridors, a supermarket’s aisles, a wide street at dawn. Sound is the instrument: a crash without warning, phones that ring like alarms, Brion’s percussion and pump organ rising with his panic and settling when he plays the harmonium. Colour carries feeling, his blue suit against warm rooms, flares across the frame, Blake’s interludes where feeling outruns narrative. Told with stable sound and centred frames, it would become a plot about a shy man. Held where it is because the Utah plot and the brothers’ attacks return to genre grammar for a large share of a short film. There Will Be Blood, whose order of silence and speech is the knowledge throughout, stands at 8.8.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Twenty-four years of evidence, and the questions have stayed open: whether Barry’s violence is cured or merely directed, and whether the film endorses the brutality it ends by applauding; what the harmonium is, grace, chance, art or the instrument of a feeling not yet learned; why Lena chooses him, which the film does not explain; how far the film is a commentary on its star’s other films, a reading that has grown with his later dramatic work. On return the colour plan, the rhymes of noise and silence and the pudding as a figure for loopholes in a consumer world reward attention. What holds the axis: much of the return is to texture and performance rather than to new meaning, one of the open questions is an absence, Lena, and the critical literature is smaller than that of the director’s larger films.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 2000s. The intrinsic force is real and limited: the film showed that the persona of a broad comic star could carry an art film without irony, and that a romance could be built from anxiety, abstraction and noise; it compressed the scale of American auteur cinema after the ensemble films of the 1990s. It perfected a personal manner more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a shared directing prize at Cannes; a lasting influence on how its star’s dramatic register is read, with later films, the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems (2019) among them, commonly placed in its line; and a share in the decade’s off-kilter American romance that is arguable rather than demonstrable. The redirection is local.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film as released survives whole, with nothing lost and no other cut known; a later restoration repairs and does not revise. Presence across twenty-four years is continuous: revival screenings, home video, a restoration in a prestige collection, steady critical attention and a cult reputation that has grown with the director’s. It is not presence of the widest kind, less than the director’s larger films and less than the most circulated art films of its years. The surface ages little: the warehouse, the phone lines and the pudding promotion date the film mildly to its moment, but its colour and sound remain its own. Twenty-four years is a middle span, enough to show survival and short of the gate.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The making carries the form in several departments. Robert Elswit’s anamorphic photography isolates in wide frames and uses colour washes and flares as feeling. Leslie Jones cuts on noise and lets the Honolulu embrace hold. Jon Brion’s score, percussive in panic and tender on the harmonium, is placed as Barry’s nervous system. Sandler holds the violence in the shoulders before it breaks; Philip Seymour Hoffman makes Dean a small screaming man in a few minutes. The costs are weighed heavily because they run through a short film: Lena is underwritten, and Emily Watson must supply by warmth what the script does not; the brothers’ attacks are staged more loosely than the rest; and the pudding exposition is carried by montage that works less hard than the film around it.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Hoffman screaming down a phone in a mattress store in Provo, broad farce, and the embrace in silhouette in Honolulu, held still in the light. One law governs both, pressure and release. The world presses on Barry as noise, threat and shame, and each movement builds until it breaks, in rage or in love. The farce is pressure, the embrace release, and the sisters’ party, the wrecked restroom and the slow accumulation of pudding obey the same law. The range is wide for a short film. What holds the axis is that the law bends where the plot must resolve: in the Utah plot, where genre logic takes over, and in the ease of the Provo ending, which the law permits but does not earn.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 95 minutes holds. Barry’s consciousness, held from inside through form; the family, seven sisters and a brother-in-law, as chorus and wound; labour and small commerce, a warehouse business selling novelty plungers, with Lance and the morning routine; the consumer economy, in the pudding promotion; sexuality as commerce, in the phone line and its extortion; travel and the city, the Valley and Honolulu. They are integrated, since the promotion, the extortion and the romance are one movement. What holds the axis at its floor, the lowest of the twelve: Lena’s consciousness is nearly absent; the state, history and the natural order do not enter; the sacred is present only as figure, in the harmonium. A small form held tightly, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.4, then The Living Form at 7.8, then The Inevitable and The Made at 7.6. A film that survives whole after twenty-four years, its colour and sound its own; a form in which frame, sound and colour carry how the world feels to an anxious man; a lean cut in which the harmonium, the pudding and the phone call each pay; and a making in which photography, cutting and score serve as the hero’s nervous system.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.0, at its floor: a man, his family, his work, a phone line and a promotion held tightly through him, with the woman’s consciousness nearly absent and the state, history and the natural order not entering. Below the rest, The Archetypal Deep at 6.9, a quest evoked by tone and colour and lightly carried; then Pressure on Tradition at 7.0, a personal manner perfected with a local reach, and The Unconcealment at 7.1, a disclosure close to a mood.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.8, The Made at 7.6, The Inner Law at 7.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.4 falls a tenth short of the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve at 7.4, The Unconcealment at 7.1, Pressure on Tradition at 7.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 6.9 fall further short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Archetypal Deep, 6.9, Pressure on Tradition, 7.0, The Unconcealment, 7.1, and The Swerve, The Bottomless Well and The Inner Law, each 7.4, all below 7.5; The Sublime meets it exactly at 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, meets its own floor of 6.0 exactly. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.3, from a sum of 88.1, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Punch-Drunk Love as released, the theatrical cut of about 95 minutes, in English, shot on 35mm in anamorphic widescreen at 2.39:1, with no other cut known; premiered at Cannes in May 2002 and released in the United States in October 2002: written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, with photography by Robert Elswit, editing by Leslie Jones, music by Jon Brion and colour interludes by Jeremy Blake, produced by JoAnne Sellar and Daniel Lupi among others, with Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán and Mary Lynn Rajskub. “He Needs Me”, by Harry Nilsson, is heard as it was sung by Shelley Duvall in Popeye (1980). No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. One line is quoted, the only one whose words are certain here; other speech is described. Details that could not be verified, among them the budget and the box-office returns, who supervised the later restoration, the counts of scenes and shots, and the sisters’ nickname for Barry, are not given.