“There Will Be Blood” has proven a vexing movie for me; my simple test for almost anything literary or cinematic is that it moves me on many different levels, somehow touches my soul. I have concluded that the film is great but like “Citizen Kane” has a coldness to it, although the furnace/sled ending and Hermann’s music forever roasted in me primally — the loss, the abandonment, the agonies of memory forever left to the self and unknown to the world. Sheer heart-rending.
Watching Daniel Day-Lewis is like watching a slide into third, legs outstretched, spikes high, going for the bag. Everything else is obliterated in that one move; this may be an example in which the actor destroys all else by his intensity and in so doing left this moviegoer untouched. By seeing this cyclonic fury pass by one is stunned, but much of the characterological environment is left unsensed. Paul Dano, who plays a lubricious minister, is a scoundrel of the first order, a religious scoundrel which makes him more than corrupt. Soothed in the liquids of his own hypocrisies and seen by Daniel Plainview for the creep he is, he is the one character who comes out of the celluloid to meet you; in the last and devastating scene he is intimately involved as well. It is hard to play a scene against the tornadic Day-Lewis, but he holds up.
And let me share an association (perhaps a curiously apt one) I have been experiencing about the final showdown. When Day-Lewis is in a two-shot with Dano, raging and fulminating, I thought of the Alien series, especially the scenes where the predator is inches from Sigourney Weaver’s face. Jaws open, acidic brews, and fumes and a tongue-tail just itching to spew out, I felt Day-Lewis had that audacious creature-human power as he unleased invective against Dano. And the attentive moviegoer saw drool slip down the side of his mouth and fall away.
We are presented with a force that has no history; we hear something about Plainview’s past as a young person, not much. We are told the givens, and asked to finish the theorem by ourselves. I suppose I am saying that that the performance eats up the picture and this is a fault. And what are we to extract from all this sound and fury signifiying nothing?
Plainview experiences betrayal, commits murder, has the distrust of a paranoid, the empathy of a gnat, the guile of a Barnum, the capacity as a parent to destroy a chiild’s psychological innards, a whole panoply of disfigurements. Shrewd and completely self-serving, he is a towering Shakespearean character of dynamic force and presence — what a stew! Alas, he still, at least for me, doesn’t grab my soul. It is a conundrum.
I will not reveal the last line of the movie, for it has several meanings to it. The genius of the film is that we do not see Plainview’s face. Damn! Perhaps that was a mistake. We watch and are spent. I have no more to say, but I will come back to touch up this oil. I didn’t relish spending time in the theater with a full-screen cobra hissing at me, fascinating, frightening, and very exhausting.
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