It seems to me that our culture has become far too self-conscious to allow itself to be absorbed by an operatic film like There Will Be Blood. We're more comfortable skimming surfaces. To be sure the surfaces are stunning and without flaw. In terms of picture, Robert Elswit does the West even better than Roger Deakins. There are of course other aspects of the film that remain in light or in plain view as it were. There were so many laughs during the matinee at Cinema 21 yesterday. Really they should be cracking up at the absurdity of most of the reality-based crap on television, including Fox News. This self-aware need to let everyone else know that we get it, is a real handicap when watching someone like Daniel Day Lewis, whose pyrotechnics are from another era. His flinty firebrand Daniel Plainview is more like the portrayals by Orson Welles, Charles Laughton or early Jack Nicholson than any of the icebergs toplining contemporary movies.
Or maybe it's not that at all. Maybe the audience senses a postmodern comedy in the grins and growls of Day Lewis's scenery chewing. It's as if he's channeling John Huston's insinuating snarl, not Huston the filmmaker but the actor playing Noah Cross in Chinatown. Some sort of meta-commentary on the pioneer spirit as depicted in epic Westerns. Perhaps Paul Thomas Anderson simply doesn't give Day Lewis anywhere to go. David Mamet cautions against the epic, asserting that the sprawling scope undermines story. Anderson blatantly disregards such perspectives as There Will Be Blood is plainly nihilistic. Daniel Plainview is driven by more than greed, he just wants to come out on top. This seems to be an egregious example of what historians call mentalite -- imparting a modern conception of psychology onto an historical figure or event. Anderson leans heavily on the contemporary idea and metaphor of "No Blood For Oil" without regard for framing ambition in the traditional context of industry and the Protestant work ethic. His argument isn't very conspicuous or cogent on the screen. Perhaps it's too soon to tell -- subversion is often viral and a mere twelve hours could be too soon to tell just how powerful his ideas are.
My see-sawing might be annoying you by now -- so many "perhaps's" and "maybe's". You might want me to be clearly on one side or the other of this film. Maybe I've been infected by Anderson's dissidence after all. For all of Anderson's praise of the simple story, he never gives us one. In the first act of the film I was close to dozing off. It wasn't boring per se, more hypnotic. At the exact moment I became aware of this, I noticed the oil pump pumping up and down in steady rhythm, the camera sweeping around it, the score's syncopated beat (the music, by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead, is amazing and as anachronistically bombastic as Daniel Day Lewis's performance). And then, BOOM! Oil and personal catastrophe strike.
It's quite possible that the postmodernism of Anderson's films, this one in particular, is troublesome to traditional critics like Armond White or professors of History at Reed College. Maybe he is a great pretender, a thinking man's Tarantino, sampling classics, even classics that sample classics like Chinatown. Though with the confidence and assurance to know that there is no unifying classic to be made in our times. A nod to the abundance of information and content mixing the black hats and white hats into hats of the infinite shades of gray of the red and blue states - we like to think there's polarity, but the spectrum of today's world is muddy. If so, he manages to do this without winking at us. Maybe, like his mentor and dedicatee Robert Altman, he doesn't care how we feel about his films, acknowledging that in our various judgments we are all culpable and that we no longer need, nor deserve, Transcendence.
As much as I would like to sign off with that last turn of phrase I need to gush about Paul Dano for a moment. He's the real deal, able to stand toe to toe with Evil incarnate and wrestle with his own ambitious demons in the same breath. Daniel Day Lewis was at his greatest in the scenes that he shared the screen with Paul Dano.
I need to see this film again.
Forse,
Signore Direttore
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