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January 25, 2008
UH, I'LL SKIP THE MILKSHAKE THIS TIME, THANKS
THERE WILL BE BLOOD is the most astoundingly visual film of the decade and, in terms of its visceral intensity, it hearkens back to silent movies that were never made because, at the time, it was impossible. The central metaphor is not necessarily the titular one – blood – but it might as well be; I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to believe, midway through the film, that Daniel Plainview has replaced his red stuff with black stuff. In the eyes of P.T. Anderson, I don’t believe this is just a clever critical metaphor, or an allegory for understanding the forces of greed and capitalization in the 20th Century. Yes, I believe that P.T. Anderson seriously believes his protagonist has oil coarsing through his veins – this is the kind of simplistically grim yet horribly and brilliantly vivid conceit that he would force upon us, much as his protagonist forces himself on, first, the earth, and later humanity.
In a performance that evokes no one you’ve ever seen, Daniel Day-Lewis snarls, grins, digs, and schmoozes his way into the psyche of a character who would like to believe he has no psyche. A lesser director would tell us Lewis’ Plainview is a monster (I’m betting this was Upton Sinclair’s vision), a Frankenstein of capitalist envy, corporate greed, and barbarism.
And yet Plainview is also capable of compassion, sympathy, and even (whether he fakes it or not – this is one of film’s most elaborate, unsung mysteries) a desire for a community that will never struggle. I firmly believe that Plainview firmly believes he is laboring so he can erect some oil-fertile Utopia, and yet he is also demonically selfish. He needs the very people he casts away and kills. Or maybe he is a monster, but sweet lord what a monster! This is not only the best performance of the year; it may be the best performance of my lifetime. And I say this having always been somewhat lukewarm to Lewis’ quirky, often gregarious talents.
I’m sure Freudians and other wackos would make much out of sticking things into the soil to pull things out of it, but it’s to Anderson’s credit that the film presents the hard labor with the detached fascination of a documentary. They see the process and result the same way Plainview does: it’s hard, brutal work but then it explodes and it is, by God, worth it. At no point does “digging for oil” become “some latent substitute for the director’s vision of the American dream.” This is because he grounds the film in tertiary characters who take the focus of (and from) our protagonist’s frighteningly singular vision.
Paul Dano did not get an Oscar nomination, but I feel he would if he gave in to a lot of actorly tricks and stock caricaturisms that the role might have offered. As a repentance-preaching preacher, his Eli Sunday is just good enough to appeal to the type of people that Plainview can easily dupe. And the intense binaries of strength and weakness, turpitude and corruption, conviction and malleability, are too tricky for us as an audience to figure out. Without spoiling anything, this is why the ending works, though others are criticizing it. At times, watching him is like seeing a 1927 daguerreotype come alive; and this is all the more effective because Lewis’ Plainview can seem so terrifyingly modern in his take-the-prisoners-and-then-search-their-pockets mentality. In this, we have the oft-commented-on struggle between spirituality and sensuality, seemingly existing in some Manichean form, but, on closer viewing, not. Plainview and Eli Sunday are fat, bleeding humans, and if you disagree, have another look at the scene where Sunday forces a conversion out of him. Hannibal Lecter would have slathered and snickered his way through the theatrics, but Plainview is not a psychopath and he doesn’t want to be.
I don’t know about you. Maybe you are really excited about 27 DRESSES or the new RAMBO; but movies like this remind me why I both love movies and am haunted by them. I did not enjoy TWBB; at times Anderson seemed so tedious and distracted in his storytelling that I began to lose interest. But there’s always been something about Anderson that, outside of Speilberg, he’s the manipulative of directors. And, without competition at least in American cinema, he’s easily the most audacious – anyone who has watched the last thirty minutes of MAGNOLIA has to agree with that.
The film’s closing moment begins to climax a on perversely weird and satisfying line, “I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!” Some have argued that this is where BLOOD turns into a comic commentary on itself, or it’s where Anderson loses control of his masterpiece and gives in to some wildly subjective vision. I not only wholeheartedly disagree; I think such criticisms are pointless. This line is spoken by a man, after all, who has no blood. Oil has sutured itself into his being in such a way that he can only understand life’s puzzles through the metaphors he has concocted to understand it. And, oh yeah, this also makes him f***ing insane.
So it’s the best movie of the year. The new CITIZEN KANE – only without Welles’ populism and whiz-bang storytelling. The latest, most intense, and perhaps most successful and unsatisfying variation on that mystifying Mark 8:36 conundrum: “What does it profit a man to gain the world but lose his own soul?” I think Anderson believes in the soul, but he also believes in a lot of other pretty powerful shit, and the motivations necessary to do it, and the nature of the world that contain it.
Oh yes. There will be blood.
| By Andytown | 01:08 PM
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Comments
Great review.
Posted by: Harvey at January 29, 2008 09:13 AM