Month: January 2008

Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is an implacable, unstoppable juggernaut of historical phantasmagoria and sheer strangeness adapted from the opening chapters of Upton Sinclair’s muckraking 1927 novel Oil!. While it has its set pieces, notably an apocalyptic oil fire, the film is a stylistic changeup for Anderson, a director previously known as a bit of a technical daredevil. As he charts the rise to power of California prospector turned oil magnate Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), Anderson reins in his camera pyrotechnics and slowly works his way through a big, sprawling, violent American landscape with deliberate care that borders on reverence. For better and worse, the end result is one of the damnedest things you’ll see at the movies all year.

The first part of the film inches along with the kind of righteous, artless blunt force that Sinclair summoned in his 1906 meatpacking exposé The Jungle. The great potential riches of the oil fields are always checked by the deadly working conditions of early-20th-century mining and drilling. Although dialogue is minimal in these opening scenes, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s menacing score barges in at the beginning and refuses to shut up. Watching the film, you start to feel like you’re inside a dangerous factory as it’s being built.

Alas, melodrama is even slipperier to handle than sweet, light crude. The second half of the film is as strange as the first, but it settles into a much more familiar shape as Day-Lewis’ aging, distant plutocrat mows down everyone who faces him. But this predictability and conventionality was tipped off much earlier. You can hear it in the names of the characters. This is a film where Plainview’s nemesis (Paul Dano) is a fiery evangelical minister named Eli Sunday. Sure enough, “E lies” like all them other folks in the fire-and-brimstone crowd do. You half-expect Day-Lewis’ business rivals to be named Bilkemoor and Steele, and you are more than a little shocked when he doesn’t fall in love with a woman named Prudence Goodwife.

But the slow burn of the finish never dims Day-Lewis’ electrifying performance. Taken collectively, his historical re-creations of American men are impressive in their range, depth, and symbolic force: In 1992’s Last of the Mohicans, he personified guileless strength. In 1993’s The Age of Innocence, he exemplified upper-class male cowardice. In 1996, he assayed frontier stubbornness in The Crucible. And he was probably the best thing in 2002’s Gangs of New York, playing a racist nut on the urban frontier. Now he embodies rampant capitalist aggression, and there’s a sense of finality in his performance, because it touches on all of the ugly Americans he’s played in the past.

Just like that indomitable showman P.T. Barnum, P.T. Anderson loves the freaky side of human nature, and this fascination is clearest in the film’s final showdown in a private bowling alley. Symbolism and political sophistication melt away as the scene explodes in bombast, metaphor, tenpins, and stale meat. He shows us two charlatans duking it out, two hucksters conning each other to death. The scene may be all punk political disdain and histrionic shouting, but as Plainview says earlier, it’s a helluva goddamn good show too.

There Will Be Blood

Opening Friday, January 18th

Studio on the Square

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a visionary celebration of language, women, food, memory, the imagination, the creative impulse, and (somewhat strangely) all the wonderful, life-affirming things you could be doing instead of watching movies. Through some daring subjective camerawork and many beautifully nuanced performances, Julian Schnabel’s new biopic is genuinely inspirational.

After an opening-titles montage of X-ray pictures scored to a French version of “Beyond the Sea,” the film opens when Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominic Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) awakens from a three-week coma. And for 15 gorgeous, startling minutes, we see the world entirely from Bauby’s extremely and mysteriously limited point of view. Like him, we are confused and disoriented: It is hard to separate dreams from flashbacks, and the random visits by medical professionals only increase the uncertainty and anxiety. Gradually, Bauby and the audience learn that he has suffered a massive stroke, leaving him a completely paralyzed victim of “locked-in syndrome.” His mind is intact, but his body is almost totally immobile.

This opening sequence is as profound an examination of the limitations of subjectivity as Hitchcock’s Rear Window. For the first time in a long while, moviegoers are reminded of the sheer wonder of seeing things: hallways, curtains, windows, sunlight, human faces. This fragility of vision is most powerful in the scene when Bauby’s right eye is sewn shut. As the screen slowly changes to pinkish-black, the effect is invasive and upsetting; it’s like an improbable reverse shot from the notorious eye-slashing opening sequence of Un Chien Andalou.

Eventually, Bauby’s range of motion is limited to his left eye. But after some dark nights of the soul and a dressing-down by his nurse Henriette (a radiant Marie-Josée Croze), he comes to terms with his new existence and embarks on writing a memoir of his experiences. The ingenious system of communication (and later, dictation) Henriette devises is simple, effective, and agonizingly slow. At times, you’ll feel like you’re trapped in a spelling bee at a French elementary school, but struggle and patience are essential to conveying Bauby’s willpower and lust for life.

Amalric — who also appears as a healthy Bauby in several important flashbacks — delivers a performance of great delicacy and wit. And his wit energizes the film. Bauby’s observant, ironic voiceover is disarmingly, consistently funny, especially in one scene when he silently begs for mercy as a gorgeous speech therapist, in an attempt to teach him how to swallow, lolls her tongue around her mouth just inches from his face. In another scene, he chastises Henriette when she takes offense at some wisecracks at Bauby’s expense. He laughs loudly at the remarks: “Ah, Henriette,” he sighs, “you have no sense of humor.”

This rueful joy at the ways of the world is also expressed through some flashbacks showing Bauby’s relationship with his ailing father (Max von Sydow). Von Sydow, given a chance to really act after years of playing demonic heavies in Hollywood blockbusters, does not waste the opportunity. His sad, graceful performance is entirely in tune with this delicate, wondrous work.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Opening Friday, January 18th

Ridgeway Four

The Savages teams Laura Linney with Philip Seymour Hoffman, the Robert De Niro and Al Pacino of the crummy-looking, myopic indie film. They play a pair of muttery, slovenly, small-minded siblings forced to take care of their ailing father (Phillip Bosco) once his live-in girlfriend dies. If you’ve seen either actor in Willy Loman mode, then you can tick off their dull virtuoso moments with ease: Hoffman explodes in rage, Linney implodes in front of God and everybody, and later in the movie they mumble phony, “revelatory” apologies to one another.

Fortunately, as unsurprising as either lead is, writer-director Tamara Jenkins’ direction is a little friskier at first. She photographs the Arizona desert where Bosco lives in hyper-saturated slo-motion as if mocking the opening montage of Blue Velvet. But I’ll be damned if I can guess why she did it, because she pulls up stakes 10 minutes into the film and moves the action to downbeat, dirty Buffalo, inadvertently (or perhaps deliberately) eliminating the possibility of a decent-looking scene, shot, or image in the process.

Some of us are at the age where our parents can delight in their grandchildren and complain about taking care of their own parents in the same breath. Elder care is a serious and not always pleasant subject. But can it be mined for comic material? I wonder. It would probably require a lighter touch, more sensitive and generous actors, and more free-floating compassion than anyone in this lukewarm and ugly-looking film can muster.

Opens Friday, January 18th, at Studio on the Square