O'er the top

Given, it's not a "nice" film, but it qualifies as a great one.

I just got back from seeing There Will Be Blood, and while there's an ongoing battle that I've realized exists as to whether this Paul Anderson-directed effort is great filmmaking or not, I'm voting for "yes." The two and a half hours in the theater weren't pleasant, but need we be reminded that "pleasant" is not a requirement in the film-viewing world? Mind-expanding, yes; disturbing, ditto; and what I loved about this effort are the connections it brought to mind: Citizen Kane, an obvious one; Moby Dick, for its treatment of obsession, and the friend I attended the film with remarked that not only does Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) have a voice with the honeyed tones of the ageing John Huston, in Chinatown, he actually has a character shaped on the same last. I came to the conclusion that this is one of the truly great films about the prototypical American as "confidence man," and there's a certain resonance in that, since I've been thinking about the con man as archetype for maybe a dozen years (actually, I can safely say that that's been true since 1978, when I took a course from Roy Harvey Pearce, in which I was looking into Pearce's past writing, and realized that he'd written about Melville's The Confidence Man, so it's more like thirty years now!). Add in O'Henry's The Gentle Grafter, and George C. Scott as The Flim-Flam Man, and think of all the other appearances in film, fiction, short story, and song. That's what Plainview is, in truth — though some of you might argue that he's really just "a businessman," but he's deceiving people (and profiting from that) right and left — and so is Eli Sunday, the snake-oil evangelical preacher, who is more literally about "touching" his flock, purporting to heal the afflicted.

When a filmmaker deals with the theme of "obsession," it can come out in many ways. First of all, for some (maybe a lot ... ) of directors (who are usually the auteurs in such cases), the film itself becomes an obsession: Think of the remarkable pairing (which Gary Hausladen and I actually teach, in Geography & Film) of Coppola's Apocalypse Now (wonderfully treated in Hearts of Darkness, by his wife, Eleanor), and maybe even better, Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, treated anew in Les Blank's Burden of Dreams, and those two pairings reveal the inside and the outside of film, and the compulsions that drive their makers. There are five dozen other examples, but since those provide film-on-film, the mix is especially nice.

What's it about? For me, it's about people, competition, the early rise of capitalist entrepreneurs, and gaining the upper hand. But it's also about isolation, loneliness, and how that's remedied. Nothing simple, in other words; Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) plays a hideously ambiguous figure (like Plainview), except that where Plainview is searching for money, Eli Sunday is searching for adulation (but, at least by the end of the film, he's searching for money, too). They need human contact also, literally so in the preacher's case, but Plainview makes do with a few hugs of his son (until he throws him away, and then is slapped when the boy returns — a sharp and emotionally biting scene that marks the beginning of the end for Plainview). And I might add (just for the record) that I consider the ending to be letter perfect; seems to me that, after a film filled to the brim with physical ideals (not physical attractiveness, but the perfect study of motion and movement), the final words and the body language (and even the cinematic inflection) of the last scene are square-on. Hardly pleasant, but then ...

Incidentally, the score was unnerving and completely up to the task. Bringing Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead in on the soundtrack was a risk, but one that's operatic, which is (truth be told) what this film is all the way through: If they made operas from films about great but tragic figures, the librettists would be all over this. It's not an unobtrusive soundtrack, but then, for a long time I've been a fan of the sorts of soundtracks that Tarantino and Cusack put together.