Punch Drunk Love Review

This review comes from my Letterboxd profile, where I review every movie I see.

Well... that was... something. I'm not even sure if I fully comprehend what in the world even happened over the past hour and a half, but I know that there's something here that just completely sucked me in. To me, there's a definite difference between a movie that turns you away because of its weirdness and a movie that sucks you in because of its weirdness. The former makes its plot and characters so nonsensical and so unbelievable that you don't care about what's unfolding on the screen. The latter immediately hooks you in with some strange occurrence, character, or choice that you WANT to know more about and keeps you hooked even if you don't know what you're watching. Punch-Drunk Love is most certainly the latter category for me. I don't think I've pieced everything together by any means, but I WANT to. I guarantee you they're there, but I have no idea where to even start looking for them.

What personally ended up turning me away from The Master on first viewing is that to me, the movie's weird aspects felt distant. I couldn't latch myself to anything unfolding on the screen because there was no intriguing hook or punch to get me on board with the weirdness in the first place. With Punch-Drunk Love, the opening strange occurrence of this movie immediately hooks you in because of how weird and random it is. You were just watching a pretty normal phone call happening, then all of a sudden, bam, something happens that you weren't expecting and that doesn't make sense in the slightest. Why did that happen? What does it have to do with the plot of the movie? Will it be answered by the end of it? If you can't ask questions like that with a movie like this, you're gonna be turned off by it pretty much immediately.

However, despite that initial hook, I was still incredibly weirded out for the first 20 or so minutes and couldn't figure out why I was still so invested. Finally, it clicked with me why I kept wanting to watch: Adam Sandler. Every aspect of everything to do with Adam Sandler kept me hooked in this movie. Why does his character seemingly not bat an eye at some of the strange things that unfold right in front of him? Why is he so violent at times? Why do his moods swing so much, why does he change opinions in the blink of an eye, what is it with his character? I may or may not have a theory about why his character acts the way he does, but I honestly don't know if I can fit all of the pieces together to support that theory. Whatever the case may be, his backstory intrigued me throughout the course of this movie, and his absolutely phenomenal performance insured that I would definitely be staying for him. With The Master, there wasn't any character that I was even remotely curious about diving into the past of. With Barry in Punch-Drunk Love, I wanted to know SO much more, and that alone kept me engaged.

This movie is awkwardly intense, which are two adjectives I never thought I would combine together to describe something. Everything about the way it's directed, written, edited, shot, and composed just feels slightly off. There's a certain bite to disjointed conversations between characters, particularly a phone conversation that occurs early on between Barry and a woman where both of them want completely different things from the conversation. Whenever loud noises are heard by the characters, the editor decides to punch up the volume and sometimes intensity of the sounds. There's a scene in a bathroom where all of the loud sounds feel like some gated reverb effect. I know the director and editors made a purposeful choice there, but I have no idea why and that entices me. Adam Sandler and Emily Watson's performances and chemistry entice me. The disjointed tone of the movie entices me, and even though I've explained why, I still don't even think I know why myself.

This is definitely a movie worth analyzing, worth watching multiple times to understand the point of. It makes me want to re-watch films like The Master and Birdman that I watched once and thought they were too weird to watch again because maybe they'll impress me more the second time around. It makes me want to think for hours about what this film means and what Barry's actions mean and why many questions, both minor and seemingly integral to the resolution of the film, are left completely unanswered by the end. I loved the direction, acting, and music in this film and I don't think I've ever experienced a film that made me feel like this. In all honesty, the basic question I want to ask after watching Punch-Drunk Love and understanding that Paul Thomas Anderson is an eclectic director and trying to figure out what it is about this movie's technical choices that I love so much is simply this: What the hell did I just watch?

Letter Grade: A+

Did any of what I said make sense? I'm not 100% sure how well I worded myself in this review. This movie kind of threw me for a loop, if you couldn't tell. If you have any questions about what I mean by certain things I said in this review, let me know down in the comments below. I'm definitely being purposefully vague simply because I want you to experience this movie for yourself without really knowing anything about it, just like I did. Hopefully, there's something about this movie that'll stick out to you.