there was blood

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I take it all back: all those years of thinking he was too pretty, a lightweight, boring, a worthless scoundrel beneath encouraging.* I take back all the conversations I’ve had about The Last of the Mohicans, a movie so boring it was almost faithful to the book – and in which, to be honest, DDL paled (literally) beside the hunky guy who played Uncas, the noble Indian guide. The waterfalls were more interesting than he was, to be honest, in that film. I take it all back.

For yea, Daniel Day-Lewis has delivered a truly craggy performance, and in a truly craggy film. He’s fifty now, apparently. And There Will Be Blood is an amazing film, a tour de force of atmosphere and implication, a parable. He isn’t even the best thing in it: the oil derricks are ten times more exciting even than those old waterfalls. Or no: he is astounding in his portrayal of this man simply disintegrating. (Someone said to me that they don’t think Daniel Plainview develops in the course of the film, and I think this is true: he disintegrates.)

I know I’m behind the times, saying these things: everyone who’s anyone has seen it and said them already and lots more. But I’m also shackled here, because I know loads of people (sorry: it’s just the kind of people I hang out with) who haven’t seen it yet, and I can’t say the things I want to say because I think some of them read this blog, and I’d hate to deny them the experience!

So I’ll just say:

Paul Dano: wow. That is one hell of a goddamn character portrayal. Watch this guy. Christopher Walken with heart. (Only, even better: he turns out to have been the brother, Dwayne, in Little Miss Sunshine – another pivotal character – and also appeared in two episodes of The Sopranos.)

Jonny Greenwood! The music! Jesus. See, I’ve always loved Radiohead. The way the music creates the atmosphere and then seems to take the story along after it – as if we had always had that emotion and the film was merely doing us a favour by showing us why – is something I’ve barely experienced that way, ever. Even so, the thing that really blew me away I can’t talk about yet. It’s too specific and too big a part of my enjoyment of the film – it would be a spoiler.

The violence in this film is extremely interesting. It reminds me of The Godfather in the way that it sets up the expectation of violence – in fact, simultaneously creates the feelings of an aftermath of violence – psychologically. No, that word is wrong. Symbolically. Everything in the entire film is relentlessly harsh, and serves this brutality.

Also, the silence. I’m struck by the silence (which isn’t really silence at all much of the time, thanks to the afore-mentioned score which at times is almost overwhelming) and by the importance of its proximity to under the ground. Famously the first line of dialogue is spoken 15 minutes into the opening, and the preceding 15 minutes are mesmeric and gripping by turns. The hero, Plainview, is trying to find gold under the ground; later on, he drills oil from the under the ground. He is a taciturn man, and much of the story revolves around silence, the inability to speak, or to hear, or to understand. The ritualised, yet frenzied, speech of the preacher Eli Sunday has a huge meaning in the film, but Sunday’s moral character is far from clear-cut. (Interestingly, Dano’s character in Little Miss Sunshine, who has the best scene in the film, is – tada! – silent.) Of course the underground is the region of sleep and dream, and thus the seat of speech, as well as of death and the devil – which is the necessary association in this film, especially with all the fire and brimstone around. **

I preferred the cinematography in the Jesse James film, though I’m prepared to concede that this may just be my love of things that sparkle. I can see why this film was shot the way it was, though: it’s about harshness… and flatness… and it’s very clean. There were two shots that are really staying with me, one of which is ineffably beautiful and achieves the status of poetry. And it is rich in its austerity, if that makes sense. God, I’m a prat. Anyway there are one or two scenes, with the derrick etc, that pretty much won him the Oscar.

The oil! The oil, I’ll say at the risk of sounding even more stupid, sentimental, poncy, pseudy and annoying, is the blood. That much is clear as, well, tar. And of course the title is a prophecy, which is such an old-fashioned concept these days.

The story, it’s true, could be considered weak. The same person said they thought it was “too episodic,” with which I had to disagree also: it’s as if Anderson sets a thing in motion – like the arm of a derrick, perhaps – and then it has nothing to do but gather its own momentum. I saw the film with my 17-year-old, the Tall Blond Rock God, and when I told him this idea about episodicness, he said: “well, the story’s not much, but it needs to be that way to show what happens to his character.” And there you have it.

I always react too strongly to movies when I first see them. Will I always think it’s this great? Is it too harsh? Is it too inexorable, not questioning enough? Too mono, or behemoth? But you watch it and you see the entire 20th century of America stretching out before your mind’s eye like those long roads, and you see the strip malls and ugly chain restaurants and gigantic acres of carpet warehouses, and the way oil tramples on everything else, even the people, and you think: Upton Sinclair couldn’t even know all that yet! Could he?

Go see it.

(see, I don’t hate everything.)

* This would be after the famous Isabelle Adjani breaking-up-by-fax episode, which shocked me deeply at the time – though these things always look different when one is that bit older and more weary: I found the memory oddly comforting years later when someone broke up with me by informing me in an email that he had been transferred to Zurich and would be leaving the next day. Ha!

** Coincidentally, I’m also thinking a lot lately about Les Enfants du Paradis – which may sound inapt here, except that it too is a film about silence, and not speaking, and power. But where Les Enfants evokes dream life, the underground in There Will be Blood does the opposite – because Plainview is literally, as he himself says, draining it.

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