Wednesday, February 06, 2008
There Will Be Blood
I haven't done movie reviews for awhile and, with Oscar season approaching, I'd like to rattle off reviews of all the Best Picture nominees, starting with the one I saw most recently: Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood.
The plot is no doubt familiar to most readers by now. A ruthless oilman, Daniel Plainview (played by Daniel Day-Lewis) develops a life-long rivalry with Eli Sunday, a preacher in a California town where Plainview is developing a massive oil discovery. At the same time, Plainview deals with his troubled relationship with his adopted son, who is struck deaf in a drilling accident. While Plainview grows very rich, none of his relationships work out well and his life is ultimately empty.
First, let me say a few words about Daniel Day-Lewis' performance. Many critics have written a great deal about this performance and I will be no exception. Many have called Day-Lewis one of the outstanding acting talents of our time. I go further than that. I say Day-Lewis is the unparalleled master of the fine art of squinting and lurching. No one can bring a character to life through squinting and lurching quite like Day-Lewis. If you believe, as I do, that squinting and lurching is an under-appreciated art form, then this film, like Gangs of New York, is a movie made for you.
Quite apart from the squinting and lurching, this is a great film. Kubrickian. Is that even a word? Kubrickoid? Kubrickesque? It was a lot like something Stanley Kubrick would do. Not the cinematography, unfortunately, but the film's cynical view of humanity and especially it's quirky but inevitable ending are very much in the style of the old master.
All the mainstream critics have gone on at length damning the Plainview character, describing him as a sociopathic liar and equating him with Anton Sigur from No Country for Old Men as one of the great movie villains of our time.
I think they've got it all wrong. I did not see that at all.
Certainly, the Plainview character is misanthropic - doesn't care much for other people - but that's a long way from being a sociopath. The character clearly craves human attachment: he obviously loves his adopted son and willingly believes a man who shows up claiming to be his half-brother because, as Plainview admits outright, he can't handle the loneliness of the life he's chosen.
All the other critics claim that Plainview simply uses his adopted son as a sales prop, but that claim is based an entirely on an angry, drunken rant the character makes near the end of the film. There is no evidence anywhere else in the film that this is true.
As for being a liar, Plainview is a singularly bad liar. By my count, he only lies twice in the movie and each time he gets caught doing it and stumbles badly trying to recover from them. The rest of the time, he speaks more honestly than most of the other characters in the movie.
Speaking of which, I'm shocked that so few critics noticed that the preacher Eli Sunday (played by Paul Dano of Little Miss Sunshine fame) is at least as much, if not more, of a villain than Plainview. Sunday is egotistical, greedy, vain, vindictive, physically abusive and probably sexually abusive. Above all, like all faith-healers, he is a total charlatan.
Ultimately, these colourful characters are just symbols. As I see it, this is a story about America and about those brothers, Capitalism and Evangelical Christianity, that have contended for America's soul since the country's inception. The two at times appear to support each other, but in the end their passions are so obsessive and ridiculous that they can't help but be both self-destructive and mutually destructive.
The theme of brotherhood is a motif throughout the movie. Plainview is initially led to the oil find by Sunday's twin brother, who seems determined to destroy Eli. When a man claiming to be Plainview's own long-lost half-brother shows up, he is Plainview's mirror image, a failure in every way that Plainview is a success. On top of that, I suspect we are supposed to infer something from the fact that Sunday's fathers name is Abel.
I must admit that I had low expectations going into this movie. I expected it to be in the mold of Gangs of New York, a high-concept period piece produced for no other purpose than to secure lucrative Oscar nominations. It has done that, but it has earned them. It is a good movie, in fact a great movie worth seeing two or three times.
posted by Mentok @ 10:39 p.m.,
1 Comments:
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At 8:07 p.m.,
Mentok said...
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Do you mean crazy, old Sean Connery or young, sophisticated Sean Connery?
Let's split the difference - younger, not-yet-totally crazy Connery. Now that you mention it, DDL would make reasonable casting in a remake of Zardoz.
