Kind of good, kind of grows on me 24 hrs later. A feast of
recognitions, from the manner of titles and opening chords right out
the Shining as homage to Kubrick, to Murnau, to Sherwood Anderson to
Terrence Malick to Cormac McCarthy, to Altman to I don't know, even
Beckett toward the end. It was largely engrossing, nice to begin as
silent film basically for the first 20 min. Daniel Day Lewis
inhabiting as he does, more thoroughly than any actor living I
believe. He even makes someone like Ben Kingsley seem all artifice.
The thing is sort of Emersonian in its take on capitalism.
Plainview's character remains the protagonist throughout and you are
made to understand him from the point of view of the refusal to lie
and to always self-rely, to not be a hypocrite and depend as Eli
Sunday ultimately reveals by the end. (funny by the way how we he
goes crazy sermonizing, his voice sounds like Gene Wilder going crazy
in Young Frankenstein) Yes, no doubt that Eli is the evil to be
avoided and Plainview the exusably evil American thing. Sure he's
ruthless, but brutality aside, it's not actually very condemning of
him. He's not just some silly pastiche of a villain like Day Lewis
played in Gangs of New York. His enterprise is singleminded as any
artist's and therefore self-justified, self-protected. That it
therefore tries to make the action hinge on his reaching out to the
one character that represents a lifeline, the "son" he has cared for--
it's just always a bit more askew and conceptual than I think was
intended. There was a glimmer of a chance at it when Plainview was
put through the ludicrous baptism by Sunday, but it doesn't come off.
The son remains a symbol, not a person, so the conceit never twines
with the emotional intention. By the end, the face-off between
Plainview and Sunday in the bowling alley, while quite a send-up,
remained ultimately allegorical. As in here's where capitalism and
religion are revealed for using eachother and look how we recognize
that legacy here around us today in the US of A. But on an emotional
level it fails, retreats to the abstract in a way that Malick at his
best, Badlands and mostly in Days of Heaven, managed to avoid. Thin
Red Line straddles it mighty precariously and The New World, while
graphically gorgeous is a sarcophagus of refried sentiments. The
coolness does have that fastidious feel of the Kubrick hand--a kind of
detachment in retreat. (For an antidote, could use a strong dose of
Cassavetes, and it would lose all concern with appearing smart and
tough) Still, for what I'm calling shortcomings, the film is perhaps
alone in its championing possibilities in cinema today, in what was a
routine occurrence with Altman and most of the great filmmakers in the
70s. It asks something of you. It does strange inscrutable things
and wants you to pay attention. That cipher of a boy. The great
unsettled disorientation of the scene in which the doctors and others
wrestle to peer into his (presumably destroyed) eardrums. The
crispness of the scenes between Plainview and the men from Standard
Oil; the Altmanesqe sheer presence of those moments where the actors
seem to jump the tracks, go scriptless (again, toward Cassavetes at
its best). This is what can and should be done. Would that I were
doing it... How the hell to get there.
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