There will not be character development. Or subtext. Or thematic resonance. Or…
When we started this blog last month I made a point of mentioning There Will Be Blood as an example of how so much modern film criticism has become bandwagon-driven and ill-considered besides. So with its somewhat hurried release to DVD this week the time seems right to explain what we’re thinking.
As I said then, the film is not a bad movie, but it is not a good one, either. In fact much of it screams “journeyman effort.” Director P.T. Anderson has made four films before this, one very good (Boogie Nights), two good (Magnolia and Sidney), and one intriguing misfire (Punch Drunk Love). If nothing else, his films have always been ambitious, and perhaps his greatest fault is a grasp that outdistances his talented reach.
This film is masterfully visualized and expertly shot, so that almost every frame is meticulously composed. The craftsmanship is not at issue: the problem is that the story does not add up to anything coherent while the characters’ motivations remain maddeningly opaque. The audience understands that star Daniel Day-Lewis’ (Gangs of New York) Daniel Plainview is a conflicted individual with an Ayn Randian drive towards wealth and power. But the reasons are left ambivalent: worse, his antagonism for Paul Dano’s clay-footed preacher Eli Sunday is never fleshed-out besides an impatience with Sunday’s meddling. In crafting the images, Anderson forgot to fill them with ideas, so the end result is a shell – a lovely shell, but like the Grecian urn all the running around on its surface is ultimately pointless.
In attempting to make an American epic that explores the uneasy relationship between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of money, Anderson might have addressed why Protestant Christianity, particularly its twin lures of salvation and eventual afterlife, played a vital part of frontier society. Briefly, the thought of a Heaven to come made the grinding poverty and hardship tolerable.
Yet There Will Be Blood almost visibly cringes anytime a hint of complexity bubbles to its rugged surface. Especially in our own time, when religion is an actively divisive force in much of American culture and politics, such an examination might help the film transcend its limitations. But such ideas are difficult to translate into pretty images. Worse, they’re hard to act very loud about (more on that in a second.) Religion itself is instead reduced to a shallow conceit of the selfish, a clumsy flimflammery ideal for the venal and foolish. Such generalizations are expedient, but they’re not accurate nor are they intelligent. They’re also not fair.
It’s very likely Anderson didn’t mean to be so dogmatic, that he was instead interested in adapting a work and creating a film worthy of its esteemed influences, which include the works of Terrence Malick, George Stevens, and of course John Huston. But to confuse the intention with achievement is to endorse style over substance, and to confuse mimicry with competence. As a filmmaker, he’s lip-syncing. And speaking of the triumph of style over depth…
Day-Lewis does not inhabit Plalnview so much as he swallows the character whole, and his celebrated decision to “channel” Huston leaves little room for actually giving dimension to his fretting and strutting around. When you start with larger than life, there’s little room to build from there, and he goes loud rather than deep. Besides which, the choice of Huston as role model for this kind of character is sort of obvious.
Day-Lewis is not a bad actor, but like Anthony Hopkins or even Richard Burton he’s not above giving a lazy performance, either. With this and his similar damn-the-torpedoes turn in Gangs of New York (another hysterically overrated film), a pattern’s emerging of overacting disguised as intensity, a self-insistence that would seem megalomaniacal if it wasn’t soft-pedaled and enabled by the endorsement of too many film critics. Well, enough is enough. Day-Lewis’ acting has become much like the heavy metal played at air shows and truck and tractor pulls. Egregiously loud, and compelling enough within the confines of its setting, but of little substance when considered in any other context. Unfortunately, like Hopkins his prestige seems to rise the shallower his acting becomes.
Probably in an awards season less starved for quality material There Will Be Blood would have been disregarded as an earnest misstep. Maybe not. Several months after its theatrical release, however, it’s time to call the publicity department’s bluff and see through the hype. It is a mediocre film by a good director who, now that the rancorous praise has subsided, might yet learn from his mistakes.
- Michael Kabel
June 1, 2008 at 7:06 am |
While choosing There Will Be Blood as ‘the’ example for a movie that everybody likes simply because everybody likes it, I don’t know if you had doubts about the existance of people out there who like the film for reasons that you failed to grasp and who actually have reasonable explanations for it. I will easily agree that it’s no masterpiece, especially not in a year that we got to watch, in my humble opinion, the best works of Coens and Burton. Paul Thomas Anderson is too self-obsessed to realize that his films run longer than necessary (another example is Magnolia), which is a huge flaw. I have no problems with long and slow-paced films as long as they tell something worth my patience and effort (e.g. Dogville) but PT Anderson has never been that guy for me.
That being said, I don’t think There Will Be Blood is mediocre or even decent; it’s far more than that. Many people complained about the fact that the story doesn’t really add up to something but for me, this film has never been about the story. In fact, there is no story to begin with. I think the film is essentially a character study and the cinematical portrait of a man, emphasizing his personality, relationships, responses to certain things, motivations, weaknesses & strengths and many other traits. In that aspect, I find it quite similar to Scarface. So a legitimate question might be ‘is this man worth all this effort’ which would lead us to a discussion that I would be more interested to participate. But complaining about the story or lack of in-depth study on oil and religion issues doesn’t sound right to me.
I have nothing to say on your dissatisfaction with Day-Lewis, except that it makes quite obvious the great difference between our understanding of quality acting.
June 1, 2008 at 11:49 am |
Well, the definition “everyone likes it because every one likes it” is a bit over-simplified. The point I made was that the film was the benefactor of word of mouth, much of it stemming from overinflated reviews, that exaggerated its quality. My review’s thesis, with which you agree, is that it is no masterpiece; in fact, that it’s a very flawed film. I don’t think that means I “failed to grasp” anything so much as arrived at different conclusions than many others. And not to put words in your mouth, but the film would be a “masterpiece” or not no matter what year it was released, or amid whatever other films.
As for TWBB being more than mediocre, I’m not sure it’s “far more than” mediocre just because it’s a character examination that you already admit is overlong and lacking in narrative. I have no complaint with longer movies – presumbably like Anderson, I’m a great fan of Malick; nor do I have problems with characters studies. But my complaint, if this will clarify, is that issues of oil and religion (commerce and spirituality) – which are begging to be addressed by the interpersonal conflicts established in the story and which frame both the film’s climax and its notorious denouement – are both overshadowed and undermined by Day-Lewis’ acting, which I find shallow and pretentious. To quote Mick LaSalle in The San Francisco Chronicle, his performance is “all snarl and no soul.” And my understanding is that a performance should have some soul.
-mk
June 1, 2008 at 12:53 pm |
The thing about making a character study is that, at the end of it, the audience should arrive at some understanding of the character’s motivation, how he came to be the way he is, why he did the things he did, and what effect that has on the world around him. Citizen Kane is a great example of such a study – while the characters in the movie are hard-pressed to come to a complete understanding of Kane, the audience, through the benefit of seeing multiple perspectives on his life, does feel a sense of understanding and, hence, closure at the movie’s end.
There Will Be Blood does not offer such a character study. We know no more of Plainview at the end of the movie than we did at the beginning. We do not understand how his overwhelming greed came to be, nor his hatred of religion. A character study does more than simply follow a character’s actions. It delves into the reasons behind them. As such, this movie is not a character study. It is a really good idea that needed some substantial revisions and a better sense of what it wanted to accomplish before it was released.
On another note – I think a lot of the problem of the movie lies in PTA’s initial portrayal of Plainview in the overly-long initial sequence. There, Plainview clearly follows the Horatio Alger-myth of the self-made man, struggling alone (literally, the middle of nowhere, by himself) against incredible odds (broken leg, unbearable heat) to great success. It is part of the American cultural mythology to see this kind of character as a hero of sorts, and while I understand the irony inherent in making such a character a flat-out villain, to do so without any study of his character (as it’s implied this movie is) turns the movie into an overly-simplified polemic about the evils of big business and religion. This could have been so much more, as the reviewer said, and from a director like PTA, who is the poster-boy for critical approbation, we should expect more.
May 18, 2009 at 12:40 am |
review of a review:
Excellent analysis. I just saw the film, but I did not read the book. Knowing the sort of hysterical ant-religious writings that Sinclair Lewis got involved, I imagine the film may have done Lewis justice. I agree with your notion that the film did religion superficially. I did not recognize any particular style of preaching the ‘Sunday’ character displayed. (He sounded a little too much like Gene Wilder in The Producers, especially the in end). In other words, it’s as if the people that wrote the church scenes knew little of Protestant fundamentalism and just threw in the egregious parts they knew. Watching the church scenes was like reading English as devised by Chinese: kinda close, but jarringly unreal.
Bottom line: I think the writer(s) were trying to kill two birds with one stone. They wanted to hit capitalism as evidenced in the self-confessed hatred of humanity individualism of DD Lewis and religion.