Punch-Drunk Love April 24th, 2010
Originally Written 12/19/03
I’d been meaning to see Punch-Drunk Love for awhile, so I finally got around to seeing it last night. I’d heard a little about the film and was curious to see how Adam Sandler would be in it. While it didn’t totally work for me, I appreciated what it was doing.
It was a very interesting, quirky, dark-comedy love story. I wasn’t sure if it was kind of a light parody of a romance film, though it felt more genuine than that. I think it was meant to be two weird characters falling in love, with a bunch of other things happening, some of which were metaphorical, some of which were just there to show a complicated and bizarre world.
The movie got a little overboard with some of the artsy flourishes, such as random kaleidoscope bursts of colors between scenes, but I really liked other things it did. It used different lenses to distort the scene slightly, and lots of amplified ambient noise to give things an edgy feel and a look into the skewed world that the character inhabited.
There were a couple of visual flourishes that were really cute too, such as when Adam Sandler’s character is talking on the payphone to his love interest. When she says she’ll meet him for dinner, the whole phone booth lights up with this soft glow. There was a parade going on in the background, throughout the whole scene as well. The film had a very good sense ot layering things together to fill out the environment.
It was refreshing to see Adam Sandler play something different. He had traits from some of his other films, being an outcast, anger problems, etc, but he played them genuine here and not for laughs. There were no funny voices or his usual shtick too.
His character was both pathetic and endearing, and a little scary at times. His whole family (seven domineering sisters) is kind of disturbing, but you get angry at them and it engenders an empathy toward Adam Sandler’s character.
The movie’s kind of an odd mix, but I appreciated it. It had some interesting characters and it was very much character-driven too. A friend had seen it and I believe had similar feelings, but he did recommend me seeing it. I’m glad I did.