Plainview
moth:
Stephanie Zacharek wonders in today’s Salon whether Daniel Day-Lewis was too great to be good in There Will Be Blood — that is, by abandoning naturalism in his acting he’s not made the best choices for the movie. I’ve heard similar opinions from very smart friends of mine, both of whom in a 24-hour period called the movie “a great character sketch” but that there was no real story there.
I keep being surprised to hear it, not because it’s wrong, but because I had such a different impression. I was fascinated by the movie as a story of one power system supplanting another — industrialism for religion, material goods for mysticism — and I enjoyed the key characters being so much larger than life. All the better for the pieces to fall into place with the weight of history. Day-Lewis’ character’s name is the key — like many of the true rapacious characters in history, he commits his crimes right in plain view, but is too powerful to be stopped. Naturalism can tell big stories from a smaller, human perspective — but this movie was about depicting giants, the giants some people can become due to their wealth or their position (or what they represent). Despite the strangeness of Day-Lewis’ character in Daniel Plainview, his ruthlessness and sociopathy — he doesn’t seem, at least to me, implausible as someone who could have lived, or as representing a part of humanity. Instead he seems inevitable…
I tend to resist reducing art into schema that merely describe what are fundamentally political or philosophical issues, partly because to do so makes art more superficial and partly because it’s usually wrong, inasmuch as creators don’t build worlds of human depth merely to symbolize some shallow thesis.
However, I agree with Tim about this movie, despite some of my friends’ misgivings: the character of Plainview in itself, without genesis onscreen, without psychological realism, must be representative, and the complexly exploitive yet symbiotic relationship between him and Paul Sunday makes little sense except as a exploration of the ways that localized, warped Christianity assisted, then was destroyed by, materialism.
I don’t sense that the movie is passing judgment on “religion” or “capitalism,” especially not in a pat political manner. It is simply an allegory of two particularly strange varieties of those phenomena that took root in the expanding American West (and in places like Texas), and how they both collide with and bolster one another.
Key line: “I have a competition in me; I want no one else to succeed.”
Notes from others: