From the Ledge

There Will Be Blood is both the most fascinating and the most maddening film I have seen in months.  I heartily applaud it for its epic sweep, ambitious themes, and its risky, large-scale set pieces but I am also beaten down, exhausted, by its unrelenting Grand Guignol theatrics, its sometimes ridiculous outrageousness and its unforgiving length.  And Daniel Day Lewis’s monumental, celluloid-chewing, totally unforgettable but also totally self-indulgent performance mirrors this contradiction.  I think the critical acclaim is justified, but coming home from Landmark Century last Sunday, I wasn’t sure I wanted to sit through the experience again, one of my guideposts for films that I consider truly great.

Between Boogie Nights and Magnolia, I have always considered Paul Thomas Anderson one of the most audacious filmmakers working anywhere in the world today.  And really, these two movies serve as a warm-up game to the major sports tournament and endurance session that is There Will Be Blood.  Taking a character and incidents from Upton Sinclair’s novel “Oil!”, Anderson creates a world that is truly, singularly his own, boldly presenting the evolution, total commitment to, and consequences of unstoppable and unremitting greed.  There Will Be Blood is not a small movie like Juno, or a lushly stylized romance like Atonement, and although these movies are excellent in their own way and within their own intentions, Anderson’s masterpiece tower above them and many of 2007’s films because of its grand ambitions, and its forceful execution.  I feel that American cinema needs films like There Will Be Blood:  tackling large themes (greed, avarice, material obsession), painting a broad social and cultural canvas for these themes to play out in (turn of the century oil prospecting where rules were written and re-written as the pioneering oilmen got wealthier and greedier), larger-than-life, complicated characters like Daniel Plainview.  There was so much in the movie that kept my mouth agape, that made my heart race and my spine tingle with astonishment:  the dialogue-less first 15 minutes of the movie which established Plainview’s determination on getting what he wants no matter the cost; the whole set-piece around the explosion of the first well built on Little Boston land; the humiliation of Plainview at the hands of Little Boston’s fanatical preacher, Eli, played by Paul Dano, during a worship service, the finale set in the Plainview mansion’s bowling alley.  But after many minutes and rolls and rolls of celluloid full of bellowing and shouting, men running around, oil gushing, bitchslapping and rolling around in the mud, and trains rattling by, I started looking for quieter moments, for scenes without any movement in them, for interesting, quirky, wise-cracking female characters (I was a little taken aback by the lack of female roles of any substance in There Will Be Blood; I know the milieu is very male-driven, but wasn’t there a long-suffering wife or sister or a sassy saloon owner somewhere?), for more subtlety and contradiction in Plainview’s demeanor and motivations.  The film became so exhausting, I’m sure many audience members on Sunday were wishing for Gatorade spiked with Jack Daniels at some point!

Audience exhaustion is fueled and magnified by Daniel Day Lewis’s performance as Plainview.  I love Daniel Day Lewis and consider him one of the greatest actors working in film today (although as I noted in a past Oscar note many moons ago, I thought his Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York felt like a zonked out Mommie Dearest with a droopy moustache and a meat cleaver).  I think his total immersion in his roles and his risky acting choices have resulted in great performances such as his disabled artist in My Left Foot and his sexually conflicted London punk in My Beautiful Laundrette.  He is an excellent actor no doubt about it.  His Plainview is a terrific and extremely well-thought out performance; it is also outrageously over-the-top, scenery and co-star crushing, belligerent and loud.  I think the film would have been better served by more scenes such as when he quietly asks about his son’s room at the hospital he sent him off too- his face registering such conflicting emotions (guilt, resolve, yearning, paternal love), that even with very minimal dialogue, the scene is so poignant and memorable.

All the production elements are spectacular, but I do want to mention the fantastic, one-of-a-kind musical score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, which was robbed of an Oscar nomination.  I think this is one of the times in recent cinema memory when the musical score powerfully complimented and advanced the themes of the movie- although it’s a little jarring at first to hear such contemporary musical accompanying period scenes, the throbbing percussion and the gritty string compositions effectively communicate Plainview’s unrelenting greed.   This magnificent and highly original score was passed over in favor of old-fashioned, geriatric-appealing music scores such as those for Michael Clayton and Atonement. Go figure.

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