Punch-Drunk Love Movie Review

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Punch-Drunk Love
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, Punch-Drunk Love is a romantic-drama film. The story of this 2002 movie revolves around a psychologically disturbed protagonist who tries to behave like a normal person on the surface. Interesting events take place as the movie unfolds and Barry (Adam Sandler) falls in love with Lena (Emily Watson). Punch-Drunk Love is unique in its form and brings many aspects of arthouse cinema to big screen masterly. The mise-en-scene and cinematography are two major forms of the film that reinforce the narrative on the audience and keep everyone invested in Barry’s journey. In this paper, I am going to talk about these two forms in detail. I will use stills from the movie. It is not possible to detach the two forms; so, I will discuss them together.
Punch-Drunk Love is a coherent achievement of P.T. Anderson and Robert Elswit. Its visuals are engaging enough to keep the tone aligned with the story itself. The duration of this movie is 95 minutes. Despite the fact the visual elements and techniques of Punch-Drunk Love are very clumsy, a great deal of detail is written about its design. The entire film sticks to the very limited color range used for the production design and costumes, thus giving the audience a murky look (Clark 92). This gives us an opportunity to have a glimpse of the internal world of Barry whose personality traits cause friction in his mind.
Let us look at the stills from the opening sequence of the movie and try to understand the underlying meanings.
The first shot is all about describing the character of Barry (Adam Sandler). It is a very long shot of the wardrobe, with Barry sitting in one corner of it. Merging colors of his costume and surroundings give an impression that he does not like to stand out. It also has an underlying meaning of Barry being an anti-social person, and he is not bold in his choices.
The other shot in which he is walking towards the darker side of the frame shows that he is internally lost and lives a meaningless life. The third shot is where the character is standing at the door. This is after he disappears in the dark completely in the previous shot and then emerges from opening the door and stepping outside. These two back-to-back shots typify the two different worlds Barry is living in. His internal world is dark, isolated and sad, whereas the external world is at its own pace.
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