There Will Be Dud
$12 and 2 1/2 hours of my life just to see a drunk bludgeon a guy to death with a bowling pin? Are you serious?
So, we were about 1 1/2 hours into "There Will Be Blood" when I looked to my immediate left and saw Scotty taking a little nap. Apparently the gorgeous vistas and haunting music were not enough to keep him going through the full 2 1/2 hours of this critically acclaimed but overweight epic which is ostensibly about "family, greed, and religion" but offers little insight into any of those themes.
Daniel Day-Lewis's menacing portrayal of the oil prospector Daniel Plainview absorbs all the light and air around him; all the gravitas Day-Lewis brings to the role cannot overcome the thin and enigmatic character he is enlisted to depict. This is all the more apparent when Plainview is confronted by his rival, Eli Sunday (portrayed by Paul Dano). The grizzled and angry Plainview overpowers the boyish Sunday to such a degree that the viewer is left wondering why they bother with each other at all.
We learn little to nothing of Plainview's motivation as the story unfolds; his lies and angry outbursts and violent acts all spring from an unexplained source. Although he is ostensibly portraying greed, he is simply too volatile to be a cold-blooded capitalist with his eye ever on the bottom line. He belies no desire: not for sex or power or even money. When given a lucrative offer by the boys from Standard Oil, he threatens them with violence and storms off. That someone so mercurial would advance in business as far as Plainview does without being swallowed up, bought out, or pushed aside requires rather more suspension of disbelief than I am capable of. What makes him tick? We don't know, but when we get to the end and find out he's an alcoholic, we feel a sense of relief ("Aha! I understand now; he's been insane this whole time").
So too with Eli Sunday, the preacher in the small community where Plainview has set up his well, and son of the man whom Plainview has tricked into cheaply selling the land. He, too, is violent, unpredictable, and ultimately unknowable. Although we are told that he is a preacher, and we see him preaching to his congregation, it is difficult to actually believe him anything other than a caricature: we hear the fire and brimstone speech and the dramatic emotionalism that makes this sort of cartoon Christian the bogeyman to the movie's urbane and secular audience, we are shown nothing of his heart, of the God who would have him shout so loudly. That he meets his end years later, inexplicably beaten to death with a bowling pin by a drunken Plainview, but only after being mocked and tricked into loudly denying his faith (to the audience's pleasure), seems rather too fitting: a meaningless end to a meaningless story.
I haven't read Oil!, the Upton Sinclair novel the movie is based upon, so this is merely speculative, but it would seem that the film's meaninglessness derives from a defect in storytelling. After all, it is one of the most visually stunning films I've seen in a very long time. None of the characters are either knowable or likable enough to care about for the film to have dramatic merit, and there isn't enough plot to make up for the thin characterizations. The cartoonish capitalist and the cartoonish Christian are neither believable as a capitalist on the one hand or a preacher on the other, and they are not dissimilar or developed enough as people where one cares for the fate of either. Presumably the novel introduces a socialist philosophy as its redeeming element to offset the two strawman characters; that, however, is no longer viable storytelling in the 21st century. The Berlin Wall has long since fallen, and with it the plausibility of socialist storytelling.
What are we left with? A dusty, overwrought, and ultimately inhuman movie that defies its own title.
UPDATE: Scotty recently remarked, "We took turns watching it."
So, we were about 1 1/2 hours into "There Will Be Blood" when I looked to my immediate left and saw Scotty taking a little nap. Apparently the gorgeous vistas and haunting music were not enough to keep him going through the full 2 1/2 hours of this critically acclaimed but overweight epic which is ostensibly about "family, greed, and religion" but offers little insight into any of those themes.
Daniel Day-Lewis's menacing portrayal of the oil prospector Daniel Plainview absorbs all the light and air around him; all the gravitas Day-Lewis brings to the role cannot overcome the thin and enigmatic character he is enlisted to depict. This is all the more apparent when Plainview is confronted by his rival, Eli Sunday (portrayed by Paul Dano). The grizzled and angry Plainview overpowers the boyish Sunday to such a degree that the viewer is left wondering why they bother with each other at all.
We learn little to nothing of Plainview's motivation as the story unfolds; his lies and angry outbursts and violent acts all spring from an unexplained source. Although he is ostensibly portraying greed, he is simply too volatile to be a cold-blooded capitalist with his eye ever on the bottom line. He belies no desire: not for sex or power or even money. When given a lucrative offer by the boys from Standard Oil, he threatens them with violence and storms off. That someone so mercurial would advance in business as far as Plainview does without being swallowed up, bought out, or pushed aside requires rather more suspension of disbelief than I am capable of. What makes him tick? We don't know, but when we get to the end and find out he's an alcoholic, we feel a sense of relief ("Aha! I understand now; he's been insane this whole time").
So too with Eli Sunday, the preacher in the small community where Plainview has set up his well, and son of the man whom Plainview has tricked into cheaply selling the land. He, too, is violent, unpredictable, and ultimately unknowable. Although we are told that he is a preacher, and we see him preaching to his congregation, it is difficult to actually believe him anything other than a caricature: we hear the fire and brimstone speech and the dramatic emotionalism that makes this sort of cartoon Christian the bogeyman to the movie's urbane and secular audience, we are shown nothing of his heart, of the God who would have him shout so loudly. That he meets his end years later, inexplicably beaten to death with a bowling pin by a drunken Plainview, but only after being mocked and tricked into loudly denying his faith (to the audience's pleasure), seems rather too fitting: a meaningless end to a meaningless story.
I haven't read Oil!, the Upton Sinclair novel the movie is based upon, so this is merely speculative, but it would seem that the film's meaninglessness derives from a defect in storytelling. After all, it is one of the most visually stunning films I've seen in a very long time. None of the characters are either knowable or likable enough to care about for the film to have dramatic merit, and there isn't enough plot to make up for the thin characterizations. The cartoonish capitalist and the cartoonish Christian are neither believable as a capitalist on the one hand or a preacher on the other, and they are not dissimilar or developed enough as people where one cares for the fate of either. Presumably the novel introduces a socialist philosophy as its redeeming element to offset the two strawman characters; that, however, is no longer viable storytelling in the 21st century. The Berlin Wall has long since fallen, and with it the plausibility of socialist storytelling.
What are we left with? A dusty, overwrought, and ultimately inhuman movie that defies its own title.
UPDATE: Scotty recently remarked, "We took turns watching it."
Labels: artistic pretense
posted by Unknown at 4:05 AM
1 Comments:
Since I did fall asleep for a couple of ten minute intervals, the scope of my opinion is limited. I will say that the film seemed to have no message, nor did it provide much in the way of entertainment, unless a lot of unmotivated actorly behavior does it for you. What I did recognize was that Daniel Day-Lewis is very capable of virtuosic performance, but the suit is only as good as the material, and I guess we already learned how captivating he can be from Gangs of New York. After seeing "No Country For Old Men" and struggling to join the praisers for that one, I hoped this film would be the great one of 2007. Dangerously, I walked in with expectations. At the end of the day a film needs to be given to an audience, and how this is done is super important, but with the caliber of talent poured into making "Dud," I can't help but sign onto Colin's conclusion: "It was as if someone gave John Coltrane a kazoo and said have at it."
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