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Movies Forum Index » Current Movies Forum » P. T. Anderson's THERE WILL BE BLOOD is an impressive...
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| death from above... |
 Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 4:04 pm |
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PT Anderson is one of the most ambitious filmmakers around, and one of
the few big time personal filmmakers, among whom Scorsese has surely
been the most prominent. However, Anderson’s choice of subject
material for ilms prior to THERE WILL BE BLOOD has been pitiful. He
magnified flea circuses into Barnum Bailey affairs. So, BOOGIE NIGHTS,
a putrid expose of the porn community tried to be LA DOLCE VITA and
NASHVILLE—and without the irony. And, MAGNOLIA—however stylistically
impressive—tried to turn the namby pamby crybaby schticks of full-
grown adults into the stuff of Shakespearean drama and Kubrickian
philosophizing. It wasn’t hard to understand why MAGNOLIA—or LEAVING
LAS VEGAS by figgis for that matter—struck a nerve among certain
folks. Many modern folks are well-fed, decently housed, and don't have
any immediate worries about survival. Also, there are a good number of
no-talents(myspace is teeming with them) who consider themselves
artists, soulful neurotics, creative types, angst-ridden seekers,
tragic victims of society and the cosmos, and what have you. MAGNOLIA
tapped into these collective neuroses among the 'artistic' or
'neurotic' types. It was SIBERIADE and DOCTOR ZHIVAGO for spiritual
gimps. What most of the characters really needed was a good spanking.
Not that all subjects of fiction must be important, inspirational, or
grand. But, the treatment must fit the subject material. Imagine of
Ingmar Bergman had tried to turn AUTUMN SONATA into WAR AND PEACE.
Bergman understood the scale and nature of personal/neurotic themes.
MAGNOLIA was a case of crackpot cockroaches magnified into wailing
whales.
Anyway, three things can be said for Anderson. He's ambitious, has
film sense, and makes personal films. And, finally he's come upon a
material and theme to suit his grandiose cinematic mission. THERE WILL
BE BLOOD is a great, juicy, tough, and powerful subject for a mooie.
It's about ambition, stamina, greed, love, hate, devotion, betrayal,
deceit, faith, corruption, hope, family, death, life, revenge, and
all such good stuff. It has elements of the Western, Historical
Epic, Powerama, Social Criticism, and more. The movie begins in 1898
and ends during the Great Depression. It's almost like GANGS OF NEW
YORK and THE AVIATOR—and Cimarron, Boom Town, etc—rolled into one.
But, why isn't it a great movie, or even a good movie?
It is, to be sure, Anderson's best movie to date and hopefully a
learning experience. And, the first 1/3 of the movie is excellent.
But, the middle of the movie begins to sink, and the last third starts
to stink. I think one of the problems is a preening auteurism in both
style and thematics. Just as in BOOGIE NIGHTS and MAGNOLIA, Anderson
feels compelled to dwell on the father-son-ish relationships. There's
nothing fresh about it in the latest movie, but Anderson feels
obligated to regurgitate it because he—and we—know that his main
theme is 'fathers and sons'. Just when the story gets really
interesting with a host of possibilities and characters, Anderson
narrowly turns the movie into a father/son psychodrama.
Another problem is Anderson's self-conscious stylistics. If BOOGIE
NIGHTS and MAGNOLIA were visually too ripe, THERE WILL BE BLOOD mostly
has the visuals under control. But, it's a disaster in terms of
musical/aural score. We may applaud Anderson for trying to do
something different, but what doesn't work doesn't work. It's good
that Anderson forsook the usual classical muzak cliché. And, it was a
bold decision to reject most of the period music—serious or popular--
of the period in question.
How familiar and tired we’ve grown with certain periods of American
history evoked through clichéd music. So, most movies about the 20s
will give us Cole Porter-ish Jazz Age music. Or, most movies about
the 60s have to give us Beach Boys, Rolling Stones, and etc.
Instead, Anderson's choice of music portrays the darkness and turmoil
creeping and slithering within the human heart no matter the time or
place. It's as though Anderson put a stethoscope to the organs of
America hidden beneath the red, white, blue attire. It’s as though
Anderson has tapped into the sounds emanating from the bowels of
America. The very subject of drilling the land for oil serves as a
metaphor for what Anderson—and presumably Sinclair—is trying to do in
the movie. If Daniel Day Lewis digs for oil, power, and riches,
Anderson digs into the American body and psyche for meaning and truth.
Too bad he mostly finds the same usual cliché about fathers and
sons.
Perhaps, it's for this reason that Daniel Day Lewis speaks in a
guttural voice, as though his words are crude gurgling inside his
balls and stomach. When it comes to oil, he has the appetite for a
glutton and the lust of a lecher. He's the American Id, or Id
Vicious. His performance may remind the viewer of Anthony Hopkins
who didn't so much mimic as mine Nixon's character. Expressionist and
excessive, both performances hark back to the Silent Era.
Anyway, Lewis's vocal antics and the quasi-modernistic music are
nothing new in cinema. By European standards, much in THERE WILL BE
BLOOD is tired stuff. It could also be argued that THERE WILL BE
BLOOD is essentially a standard historical epic with some audio tics
culled from Resnais, Rivette, and Teshigahara. I'm sure Anderson felt
real proud, collaborating with modern composers and making his movie
SOUND so oddly different, but there still remains the question: does
it? No. The music is the worst thing in the movie; it's mostly a
series of modern music mannerisms strung together and used
hokeyishly. The effect is more deadening than illuminating. It's
grating, gratuitous, and pretentious. When this music was used
sparingly and carefully in the first scenes of the movie, it promised
something startling and different. As Anderson began to pump up the
score to the intensity of oil gushing from a well, I noticed not so
much the music as the pompous intentions behind it. It's as though
Anderson hired himself some modern composers just to boost his
credentials as a SERIOUS artist. But, the music adds little to the
story, theme, or character, and only blurts out only how Anderson
thinks he's ahead of the curve of the rest of film community. The
composers prolly took on this gig to reach a larger audience, and what
better way than by scoring a movie? Most people will not listen to
modern music, but many people still see movies. So, the musical score
for THERE WILL BE BLOOD is a kind of compromise between Anderson's
pretensions and the composers' mass pandering. It's a very impure mix
of serious and popular.
As for the performances, most are adequate to good except that of
Daniel Day Lewis. Like his character, Lewis is not one to
compromise. It's moon or bust. He will settle for nothing less than
a GREAT performance, and it's certainly worth A+ for effort. But, it
sucks. Initially, it's compelling and suggestive of more powerful
things. But, as the story gets mired in the cliché about father and
son, and as the movie turns toward greater excess, Lewis's performance
turns, at once, into a grotesque Caligari/Aguirre freak show and
amateur high school acting. When you see the mechanics of the
performance, you know it's not working. And, in the second half of the
movie, we see the strain than the effect. It's as though Lewis is
doing Tom Cruise doing Lewis. It's one of the most embarrassing—albeit
unintentional—cases of self-parody. It's Billy the Butcher—of GANGS
OF NY—trying to the Big Bad Wolf going 'I'll huff and puff and blow
our oil out'.
To be sure, it's an heroic performance, and no one works as hard as
Daniel Day Lewis, surely one of greatest actors of his generation.
But, talent and ego as big and overflowing as Lewis's needs to be
restrained by an artist of equal strength and confidence. Anderson is
not it. Anderson, either out of weakness, a fawning love of 'great'
actors, or misguided understanding of acting, has often allowed his
actors to go into overdrive and damn the torpedoes. MAGNOLIA was an
excessive acting smack down contest, with Julianne Moore probably
winning the dubious trophy. And, THERE WILL BE BLOOD allows Lewis to
carry his Lewisisms to their full, and it's not a pretty sight. There
may some people who believe that crazy acting is great acting—just as
some people think loud music is automatically great music—but in art,
energy must serve form. In the second half of the movie, Lewis seems
to be auditioning for one of the apes in the Dawn of Man sequence in
2001. (An early scene where drillers come in contact with 'black gold'
may be an allusion to the apes coming upon the black monolith in
2001. Whereas apes become men through the monolith, it's as though
men become apes through discovery of oil.). Lewis's performance is,
in large measure, a reprisal of his role in GANGS OF NEW YORK where he
spoke in a gruff and hard ass voice. GANGS OF NEW YORK was an
interesting failure, and at the very least, Lewis was matched with a
talent and ego as big as his—that of Scorsese. And, he didn't have the
carry the entire load. In THERE WILL BE BLOOD, Lewis is the only
actor who really registers. Almost everyone else is of minor
significance. One other character of some importance is played by the
Nietzschean son in LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, and though it's a good
performance, it's underwritten and under-conceived by Anderson. He's
just a piggy who's devoured by the big bad wolf. To be sure, there is
one terrific scene between the two men, where the would-be preacher
kid simultaneously humiliates and saves Lewis, wreaks vengeance and
feigns forgiveness upon Lewis who had reneged on the deal to donate
$5,000 to the kid's church. It's a strangely powerful because despite
the phony and cynical role-playing by both, the kid strikes some
genuine nerves which makes Lewis's buried feelings gush forth. There
are glimmers of real gold amidst the fool's gold, which probably
explains Lewis's murderous hatred toward the preacher kid whom he
kills in the end. It's one thing to play a man for a fool, but it's
another thing to play with man’s deepest secrets. If Wild Bill in
Walter Hill's movie couldn't tolerate anyone man touching his hat,
Lewis cannot forgive other men interfering with his personal life. He
becomes furious when another businessman lectures him about how to
raise his boy. He kills a man for impersonating his brother—and
fooling him in the bargain. Lewis knows that business is about man
fooling other men, but when it comes to issues of family, he will have
nothing of it. This is rather strange since Lewis the adventure-
seeking oilman is hardly your typical family man. He takes his ‘son’
from place to place. He semi-abandons his son after the latter becomes
deaf and tries to kill Lewis's fake brother. He never seems all that
interested in women; his business is his mistress. It's really the
sense of family that is more important than actual family. Perhaps,
it's precisely because he's so rootless that he needs to anchor
himself to the notion of sanctity of family. Much the same has been
said of Ronald Reagan who had an unhappy childhood and spent much of
his youth traveling from one town to another. He later divorced twice
and had no children of his own. Yet, he became the politician of
family values.
The twin social themes of the movie centers around business and
religion and how the seemingly diametrically opposed forces not only
co-exist but cooperate. What unites both is the wolfish lust for
power, and what makes both possible is the sheep-like or weasel-like
nature of most men. Most men don't have the balls to lead. Most would
rather follow and take orders OR tag along as hangers-on and leech off
the wolf. Most of the men working for Lewis are sheep whereas the
fake brother is a weasel. The weasel doesn't have the balls nor
imagination to lead other men nor the fortitude to do the heavy
lifting as an employee; he'd rather stick close to the big boss as a
toady and look for opportunities and privilege. If all men were like
Daniel Day Lewis's character in the movie, they would all want to lead
and not follow orders. But, on the other hand, if all men were like
sheep America would have been more like Mexico than the great ole USA.
Most Mexicans are hard workers who want to be told what to do than
mavericks who want to start enterprises on their own. Mexico, so rich
in oil, depended on American businessmen to suck it out.
Also, American Protestantism has been about individual preachers
seeking to create vast empires, the MacDonalds of spirituality. So,
America produced Billy Graham and many others—and even today, many of
our biggest best-sellers are Christian and New Age self-help books.
There is both good and bad in America, but better a nation of free
wolves and free sheep than nation of tyrannical wolves and unfree sheep
—Soviet Union and other oppressive nations.
THERE WILL BE BLOOD is somewhat relevant because of our recent
political developments. Bush came to power in 2000 mainly through the
cooperation between Old Money that wanted to pay less in taxes and
Evangelical Churches which wanted socially conservative legislation.
Despite much mutual distrust between GOP moneymen and conservative
Evangelicals, they've found out that politics goes a long way to
grease everyone's hands.
But, much the same could be said of Democrats as well. Though
Democrats are known for greater secularism, they've been selling Obama
in the grand tradition of religious mania. Though liberals insist on
separation of Church and State, they seem to have no problems with
State-as-Church. Judging by certain aspects of Obamania, you'd think
we're witnessing the second coming of Jesus. Audacity of Hope is
really the Audacity of Hype. And, it's a sad sight that liberals, who
pride themselves on being so skeptical and rational, are falling all
over themselves and wetting their pants over this slickity slack
machine politician from Chicago. And, of course, there has also been
the collusion between Jewish capitalists and radical leftists, a
relationship as odd as the one between Big Money and Big Church in
Anglo-America. Armand Hammer the billionaire was the grandson of one
of the founders of the communist party of America. And, he aided and
abetted the Soviet Union—when it was killing millions of people—in
order to make untold fortunes and to supply the communist state with
American machinery. And, the new billionaires of today are Jews in
high tech industry who are making unheard of fortunes in their youth
yet using their money to support anti-American and anti-capitalist
agendas. George Soros and Moveon.org. It's all very strange, but it
makes sense. There is the issue of 'I'll scratch your back if you
scratch my back', 'the enemy of your enemy is your friend', and 'I
want power anyway I can get it'. Generally, it's much harder to make
it real big in business than through religion and politics.
Businessmen must really come up with something that people really want
or need whereas politicians sell resentment to those with less and
preachers sell hope which is intangible—and may be utterly bogus—but
has emotional appeal to unhappy people all over the world.
Upton Sinclair, a socialist, may have considered himself beyond money
and superstition, but the biggest religion of the 20th century was
Marxism. And, no group of individuals gained as much power, privilege,
and authority as communist tyrants. Of course, it's useful to
distinguish socialists from communists, but the idea of ending
inequality, poverty, and so on is no less a religious delusion than
any other. Oftentimes, those who claim to speak for the poor are
merely secular versions of the preacher kid in THERE WILL BE BLOOD.
Like Jesse Jackson, they simply want to shake down rich folks for
personal gain—of course, in the name of the poor. Or, consider all the
academics who produce nothing, create no jobs, and make good salaries
and enjoy great benefits year after year—while tuitions keep going up—
in the name of 'intellectual' this and that when, in fact, they are
little more than ideological hacks regurgitating the same politically
correct leftist or multiculturalist trash over and over. Cornel West,
Ward Churchill, Naomi Klein, and such ilk are all self-promoting jerks
who are really obsessed about self-righteous power and control over
all of us.
And, though I haven't read Sinclair's novels, I heard that he was a
shameless sensationalist who exaggerated like crazy and even
fabricated a lot of stuff in order to get the point across. If his
zeal did some social good, give the man some credit. But, he was
drilling for 'social justice' with no less ruthlessness than Lewis's
character was drilling for oil. While exaggeration and vilification
can fix our attention on certain problems, it's also been a sordid
fact of modern politics. Whether it's left or right, the issues are
laid out simplistically and sensationalistically. In education, the
bad guys are rich white suburbanites—according to the Left—or bad
public school teachers and administrators—according to the Right. No
one has the guts to spell out the real problem—the natural craziness
of blacks and the cultural backwardness of non-white Hispanics without
an intellectual culture. Consider the fact that many non-black and
non-white-Hispanic students in public city schools do much better
though they study from the same material and under the same teachers.
But, thanks to people like Upton Sinclair, there is a legacy in
American journalism that would rather go for easy, sensationalized, or
exaggerated truisms than real truths.
The movie is dedicated to Robert Altman, which is hardly surprising
since both BOOGIE NIGHTS and MAGNOLIA seemed inspired by NASHVILLE and
SHORT CUTS. But, Altman is a poor choice for inspiration because,
let's face it, most of his movies were not that good. His great films
were MCCABE AND MRS MILLER and NASHVILLE, true summits of 70s American
cinema. But, his other movies range from interesting to downright
awful. MASH is morally putrid but exhilarating and memorable.
BREWSTER MCCLOUD is oddly eccentric in the first 1/3 and then
degenerates into 3rd rate Fellini crossed with 2nd rate Keaton. IMAGES
is pointless. THREE WOMEN is unwatchable. QUINTET is even worse. THE
LONG GOODBYE isn't much and has dated badly—like SHAMPOO by Ashby. I
haven't seen BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS, but it got mostly bad
reviews. There was talk of a great artistic comeback in the 80s, but
SECRET HONOR is a really dumb movie, many times more paranoid than
Nixon himself. (Of course, one could argue that such is the point of
the movie, that Nixon's paranoia was so total and infectious that even
those trying to understand him got sucked into the vortex. Whatever
one's interpretation, it was dumb and stupid, the kind of movie
appealing to smartasses and armchair radicals.) PLAYERS was hailed by
many as the Real comeback, but I found it limp, obvious, banal, and
generic. And, the satire was so mild that every crook in Hollywood
probably felt flattered than flattened by Altman's half-assed
critique. Some hailed SHORT CUTS as one of the greatest movies ever,
but whatever the similarities, it was no NASHVILLE; it was just a
shortcut attempt to be another NASHVILLE. NASHVILLE was memorable
because Altman acknowledged and admired the devotion and sincerity
within the country music capital amidst the corruption, compromise,
hype, and delusion. It was a bittersweet celebration/condemnation of
America, one of the genuinely great films of the 70s. SHORT CUTS, in
contrast, is a movie about a bunch of insipid, uninteresting, and
annoying jerks living around LA. One character was more irritating
than the next. When the earthquake finally rumbled, I wouldn't have
shed a tear if it killed every one of them—just I wished it had
rained cobras instead of toads at the end of MAGNOLIA. There are
some stories in NASHVILLE on their own, but the only thing that keeps
our interest in SHORT CUTS is it mercifully cuts from one bunch of
asses to another. It's easier to suffer asses in bit and pieces than
feel the full weight of a big fat ugly smelly butt. Some people said
GOSFORD PARK was the equal of RULES OF THE GAME, but it wasn't even up
to the level of most British TV dramas.
Altman was deservedly praised for trying to do different things in
cinema and for sticking to personal filmmaking. But, it must also be
said that most of his films were not only failures but dismal
failures. PRET-A-PORTER is surely one of the—if not THE—worst films by
a major director. It even made Adam Sandler movies seem like
masterpieces. Of course, we can't expect Anderson to know the
difference since Sandler is Anderson's next favorite film artist after
Altman.
Anyway, Anderson has room for growth. He knows how to make a film and
in THERE WILL BE BLOOD, he has finally found a subject that is worthy
of his ambition. But, he still needs to shed his pretentiousness, his
mannerist tics, his fawning indulgence of actors, and his overarching
auteurist themes about fathers/sons. Whatever one may feel about
Upton Sinclair or his views, the main theme of OIL—the source novel of
the movie—prolly was not evils of fathers and bitterness of sons. If
Anderson must get this out of his system, then he should adapt
Turgenev's novel and be done with it. But, when THERE WILL BE BLOOD,
which starts out so powerfully and takes on big social themes,
degenerates into a simple story of a big bad daddy... didn't Anderson
give us 3 hrs of this shi* in MAGGOTNOLIA? |
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| tomcervo... |
| Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 6:38 pm |
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Guest
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On Aug 7, 10:04�pm, death from above <cerebureaucr... at (no spam) hotmail.com>
wrote:
Quote: And, of course, there has also been
the collusion between Jewish capitalists and radical leftists, a
relationship as odd as the one between Big Money and Big Church in
Anglo-America. . .. And, the new billionaires of today are Jews in
high tech industry who are making unheard of fortunes in their youth
yet using their money to support anti-American and anti-capitalist
agendas.
Wondering when you'd get around to the Jews. |
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