Friday, August 15, 2008
There Will Be Blood
After trudging through There Will Be Blood you want to get even. The best you can do is sort it out.
The story is supposed to be about greed. The point: greed is evil and leads to no good end. Not evil in the Shakespearean sense, where character accrues to fool action. Rather, greed is evil because that makes the audience feel smugly superior to the characters; the characters are ciphers to show us what the moviemakers apparently think is an epiphany but seem to think the audience hasn't figured out for itself. No doubt Day-Lewis is a great actor and Paul Dano deserved immense credit for a hopeless part. But only Hollywood could think it is being serious when it burbles, like the La Brea Tar Pits percolating sludge, this melodramatic confusion.
As opposed to the story, the movie itself is about Daniel Day-Lewis. A shameless set piece for a great actor in which to indulge his every shade of shouting and guttural noisemaking. Day-Lewis is our greatest actor but that doesn't spare him the responsibility of making good choices. I don't think there could have been a satisfying ending, but the shapeless self-parody of an ending they settled upon became funny too soon. You wanted it to end first, then laugh.
The only thing interesting was the trivia. According to The Wiki Upton Sinclair (whose book Oil! was part inspiration for the movie) was a socialist and Sinclair Lewis (also a muckraker) worked at his socialist commune called Helicon Home Colony. Sinclair Lewis later wrote a book portraying Upton Sinclair as a fascist sympathizer. Sometimes relationships don't last.
In Sinclair Lewis' novel, It Can't Happen Here, Upton Sinclair is depicted as an eccentric and a supporter of fascism out of opportunistic motives, who is rewarded for his support of an American fascist government by being made ambassador to the United Kingdom.
If only wikipedia had explained that falling out — it might have made a good movie.