Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
A
Hole in the Heart of the West
(There Will Be Blood, 2/4/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
It's
not news that Americans prefer to romanticize the Western landscape.
Long after the "frontier" vanished, we yearn to read freedom,
opportunity, and the promise of personal reinvention in those panoramic
vistas. The phrase big sky still has a positive connotation. The mirror
image of the daydream—that the big sky can seem awfully
empty, and those landscapes swallow up as many souls as they liberate—is
less pleasant to contemplate. A few visionaries have gone there, including
directors John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (Treasure
of the Sierra Madre) and novelists William Vollmann and Cormac McCarthy.
With his desolate epic There Will Be Blood, we can now add Paul Thomas
Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) to the short list of the West's
cautionary rhapsodizers.
Based loosely on a 1927 Upton Sinclair
novel, Blood concerns one Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis),
a ferociously independent oil man who stakes his fortune in the hills
of pre-WWI California. On his way to success, Plainview knows how to
mouth the right words about family, faith, education; he even adopts
the orphaned son (Dillon Freasier) of one of his slain workmen as his
own. At his core, though, he's a raging misanthrope, an egomaniac with
"a competition in my heart" who won't countenance the frailties
of the mere humans around him. In the tradition of Citizen Kane,
Plainview is a captain of industry who conquers everything and wins
nothing.
The first and best thing about the
film is Day-Lewis' performance. He disappears into this role as few
leading actors ever have: while early in the film Day-Lewis screws his
face up to seem as anonymous as a living history reenactor, he soon
adopts a gait and voice—a grandiloquent, John Huston-esque baritone—that
befits a man living his own personal epic adventure. The volcanic, scenery-chewing
intensity of his portrait, on the other hand, can only be compared with
bravura turns by Jack Nicholson (e.g. The Shining) or Al Pacino
(e.g. Scarface)—that is, stars who never vanish into
their roles. How Day-Lewis manages this, transcending the categories
of "star" and "character actor," makes him a unique
figure in his craft.
But the contribution of writer-director
Paul Thomas Anderson shouldn't be overshadowed. His visuals are as sparely
evocative as an Edward Hopper painting. The film's deliberate, almost
contemplative pace, and the tension this somehow builds, suggest directorial
control on an almost Kubrickian level. Good as Day-Lewis is, it's Anderson
who puts him in context, where those western vistas act as a vast echo-chamber
for Plainview's colossal ego. Anderson suggests that it was tortured
magnates like him—the "entrepreneurs" of modern cliché—were
just the kind who built this country. If this were an Ayn Rand novel,
he'd be the hero-savior of the West.
What ultimately keeps There Will
Be Blood from being a masterpiece, worthy of rank alongside The
Searchers and Sierra Madre, is the fact that Day-Lewis dominates
it so utterly. His antagonist in the film is Paul Sunday (Paul Dano),
a charismatic young evangelist who competes with Plainview for the loyalty
of his employees. True, there's something to be said for imagining religion
and industry as coincident forces on the scene, sometimes in collision
and sometimes in cahoots. Nor is Dano (Little Miss Sunshine)
anything less than solid in his role.
But
next to Day-Lewis he comes off as a puny figure indeed. Watching Plainview
beat him down is as disheartening as watching the New England Patriots
scrimmage against a lower-ranked team in the Ivy League. In this sense,
Blood is less effective that other bleak period Western of '07,
Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James. In Dominik's
film the star-power of Brad Pitt was balanced perfectly by the subtle
strength of Casey Affleck's Robert Ford. It's almost frightening to
think how good Anderson's film could have been if it, too, had a worthy
antagonist to give Day-Lewis a run for his money.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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