People Ain't No Good

There Will be Blood
Landmark E Street Theater
35mm
1/6/08

I did not intend to see There Will Be Blood today. I went into DC to see The Orphanage, but church traffic on 16th Street delayed me and by the time I got to the Metro the trip would have gotten me there too late . So I went to this instead. There was a problem with the theater's house lights, so it wasn't an ideal screening. (Daytime scenes look fine, anything in the dark had a glare on the screen. There are a lot of scenes in the dark.) But I got a free pass out of it, so I'll probably go back and see The Orphanage in a couple of weeks.

I'm already three movies behind this year, but I wanted to get this one out as soon as possible, without the benefit of reflection.

Imagine if It's a Wonderful Life had been about Mr. Potter. That's my initial reaction. Daniel Day Lewis' Daniel Plainview is a monster, plain and simple. Almost every second he's on screen his eyes are locked in a glare of murderous hate and you get the impression that he could erupt into violence at any moment and for any reason. It happens, infrequently, but it does happen. He is a bitter misanthrope and spends the better half of the movie swindling rubes out of their land for the sweet, sweet oil underneath.

Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.

I don't buy the notion that movies have to be about likable people. There's a lot of interest to be had in scum. Hell, Satan is essentially the hero of Paradise Lost and that's pretty much what we have here. Plainview is basically the devil and he's fascinating, but at close to three hours of watching him sit around and hate people it begins to drag a bit and it does feel like the sort of movie that in ten years will only be watched by film students. You know the ones. They're the people you know who have actually watched Citizen Kane.

(Full disclosure - I have seen Citizen Kane at least three times.)

This is not to say that I didn't like it. It's all jumbled up in my head right now and I'm sure that once I've had time to reflect there will be things in it that stick with me.

-and now we have two days pass between the writing of the previous sentence and what follows-

I do not think that There Will be Blood is a great movie. It has moments of greatness. Lots of them. But I'm not quite sure they cohere. Time, and repeated viewings will tell. Maybe it was the lights being on that affected my feeling, because I really don't feel like I got the complete experience.

There are performances and images in here that are great, though. Kevin J O'Connor, who I've liked in things like The Mummy and Deep Rising is especially good. I don't think he's ever been better, and I don't feel that because he's usually in stuff like Flight of the Living Dead (which is sitting on top of my tv, waiting to be watched). He really is very good here, playing a man who has gotten in way over his head and waits just too long to get the hell out of of Dodge.

There's one image in particular that has stuck with me the past few days. It's in a fairly simple scene. Plainview is on the phone and someone is in the same room speaking with him. I don't remember the details exactly, but Plainview is standing in the center of the frame, wearing a hat. It's broad daylight, but the shadow cast by the hat brim swallows his face in a black hole, so that we're really seeing the very essence of the man. It doesn't matter what's being said. What we're seeing is what's important.

It really is Day-Lewis' movie, though and the whole thing is set up in the opening moments. Plainview, down in a hole, beneath the earth, in the dark, alone. How much better would things have been for everyone if this thing had not crawled out of its pit?

I want a milkshake.