Touch of Evil
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Touch of Evil ‘As painful as a root canal,’ but worth it? BY JOHN PODHORETZ There Will Be Blood Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson Over the course of three decades, from 1898 to 1927, we watch...
...I write this a week after having seen it, and I still don’t know whether There Will Be Blood should be hailed as a landmark accomplishment, or condemned as an ultimately pointless exercise...
...And I can’t decide whether Daniel DayLewis’s performance is among the greatest ever committed to fi lm, or a fl agrant piece of hammery...
...He also gives contradictory indications of being a bamboozling hustler, talking povertystricken Californians out of their share of the oil fortunes he is shrewd enough to see on their lands...
...Are we improved in any way by There Will Be Blood, this Calvinist sermon of a film...
...But as conceived by writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, and acted to a fare-thee-well by Day-Lewis, Plainview doesn’t symbolize anything other than the human soul’s tragic capacity to shrivel away...
...There Will Be Blood offers a remarkable study of degeneration, but to what end...
...For that reason alone, There Will Be Blood rises above the model of socialist agitation provided by Upton Sinclair, who wrote the novel on which it is loosely based...
...But there isn’t much in the way of contest between them...
...There are, I believe, only two scenes in which Lewis does not appear, and there are only three other characters in the movie who have even minimally defi ned personalities...
...Here and throughout, as he did in his Oscar-winning turn as a quadriplegic in My Left Foot and an 18th-century woodsman in The Last of the Mohicans, Daniel Day-Lewis demonstrates a physical commitment to performance that makes American method actors look like dilettantes and hacks...
...The spellbinding fi rst 15 minutes of the movie feature only a few words of spoken dialogue, as Anderson works with riveting force to establish Plainview’s great personal strength and iron determination...
...That is the arc of There Will Be Blood, the justly celebrated but very diffi cult new fi lm...
...I can’t remember a movie about which I’ve felt quite so divided...
...To do otherwise would be to betray the fi lm’s own moral logic...
...Such a decision would have been artistically questionable and politically noxious...
...Many critics enthusiastic about There Will Be Blood are highly critical of this fi nal scene, and think the fi lm would have been improved by its elimination...
...But the movie charts a course for Daniel Plainview, one that requires him to manifest the satanic evil on display at its conclusion...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...And because of how singular a character he is, Plainview does not seem to be a symbol of anything...
...But it would have made watching There Will Be Blood a more satisfying experience because it would have given the movie a broader and more mythic scope...
...He climbs out, drinks coffee, sets a dynamite charge, loses his footing, and tumbles into his own hole, shattering a leg...
...He is not the personifi cation of capitalism run amok, or the oil business, or America in the 20th century...
...Instead, Anderson and Day-Lewis force us into an uncomfortably intimate embrace with Plainview, and Plainview alone, for two hours and 38 minutes, and the embrace becomes suffocating...
...Whereupon the 38-year-old Anderson, in a single moment proving himself the fi nest director of his generation, pulls the camera back to show Plainview’s isolation...
...He is a strange and unfathomable person, defi antly uncategorizable...
...We begin with him literally in a hole 50 feet deep, a mine he has dug with his own hands...
...One of them is his antagonist, a suspect Pentecostal preacher named Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) with whom he fi nds himself unwillingly intertwined for years...
...The problem is that the movie probably would have benefi ted from a conscious and obvious effort on Anderson’s part to turn Plainview into a symbolic representation of America at its worst...
...Seizing a rock of gold, he manages to hoist himself out of the mine and onto his back on a rocky mountainside...
...Plainview is, like the movie that contains him, profoundly eccentric and very interesting...
...He effortlessly swings a pickaxe and scratches at the mine walls for gold...
...Plainview is a tower of a man while Sunday is a twitchy mouse, and too odd to be of much interest...
...As Plainview journeys through life, he shows signs of a nobility of spirit, in particular by taking in a child left orphaned and raising him with great kindness as his own...
...He is alone, in the middle of nowhere...
...There are moments nearly as painful as a root canal, but at least at the conclusion of a root canal one has been improved by the experience...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ There Will Be Blood Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson Over the course of three decades, from 1898 to 1927, we watch an admirable and indomitable man slowly but relentlessly decline into a despicable and indefensible monster...
...Plainview sacrifi ces all the goodness that was in him, and the movie’s audience must sacrifi ce any hope of him fi nding redemption...
...Its protagonist is a prospector and entrepreneur named Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), who begins as a lone miner digging for gold in the California mountains and ends as a rich oilman drunk and alone in the bowling alley inside his Hollywood mansion...
...He will have to drag himself on his back for miles and miles on jagged rock to save his own life and secure his fortune...
...Their fi nal confrontation, in the movie’s controversial coda, is as lopsided as a Harlem Globetrotters showdown with the Washington Generals...
Vol. 13 • January 2007 • No. 18
