i drink your milkshake!

no. 28 There Will Be Blood

It's just as good the third time around, hell, almost better. I can't find what I wrote about it the first/second viewing, which totally bums me out. I'm not the most articulate lately and Paul Thomas Anderson deserves nothing but the best my pie hole can spout. My first viewing, wow, I was so overwhelmed with Daniel Day Lewis' performance - and mostly, the prominence of the score.

Jonny Greenwood makes his foray into big film not with ease and grace, but with the sheer power that only a rock god could. Mostly, there are only geeks out there who would grant him that title, but what he does with this score is nothing short of genius. All strings and percussion (the piano being their offspring). He got totally robbed by the Academy - I believe the story is that he used, and gave credit to, a small piece that wasn't original. Because of that, he didn't get a nod for original score. Anyone who's seen this film, even for those who pay no attention to the score, are completely beaten over the head with the mood it creates. Maybe it's better to say that it nearly paints a picture of Plainview's sanity. Unsettling, unnerved, unhinged. To say that the score pushes you to the edge of your seat, makes you sit upright, pulls your head back and pries your eyelids open; there is no way you can sleep through this film. Jonny makes sure of that. Thank god everyone else on the planet nominated or handed him an award.

Greed is an easy theme to pick out, but it's interestingly built up. In "plainspeak", Plainview is like a racehorse, he sees nothing but what's ahead, a finish line to dash toward at breakneck speed. Every move he makes is planted in order to see the black gush. With HW, his son, at his side like a watchdog, Plainview is controlled, reigned in. He may drink himself into a un-wakeable stupor, but he really does care about his son, and I believe he knows that his son is the only thing to ground him in a world he hates, a world he spits on, a world he can't stomach that he's a part of. I don't think his misanthropic nature is based on a hatred of what the world is or portrays, he plainly hates the world. He reminds me of the conversation between Alfred and Bruce Wayne in the Dark Knight. If I wasn't so tired, I'd pull down the dvd for the exact quote, but it has to do with the nature of hatred, "some men just want to see the world burn." When HW's accident literally pulls him off his watch, Plainview grits his teeth to the world, his hackles never relax, it's not that he won't, it's that he can't back down. His moral compass is gone, the floodgates have been opened and he can never go back. (HW literally IS a moral compass, pointing directly to a lie that Plainview so readily gobbles up, knowing he needs someone to guide him, this new side he reveals.) To me, his greed is camouflaged by his hatred, and I guess in reverse. Some may see him as a greedy bastard, but the overwhelming agenda is his hatred of man, his desire to have so much money that he never has to see or interact with anyone, ever, including at the end, his son.

The beatings that Plainview and Eli put to one another, literally, in plain view of the world, ouch. Bitch slaps so brutal, honest, soul baring. It's not just the physical, it's one calling the other out, taunting. It's one thing to give an ultimatum and have someone "say" something. It's another when its something completely true, the more the person says it, if it's possible, the more true it becomes. They are so ugly to one another. Too easy to say greed and faith, two sides of a coin. No way, faith can be greed, we've seen it all too often. Eli embodies the false prophet. What I find most interesting is how both surrender to their disgust in themselves. I can't seem to say that correctly. In repeating the ugliness of their truth, the more it is repeated, the more they give into it's truth, the more the truth envelopes them, the truth stands on it's own, beside the man, living, breathing, bleeding. They have no choice in acknowledging it's reality, the ugliness of the conscious decision they have made, the truth standing before them. It's really actually beautiful...

This post could be ten pages long and I really must go to bed. I'm not going to do the film justice, yet alone the amazing cast. Paul Dano is a really pussy: he's pathetic, weak as all hell, wears his "faith" like a dark cloak, then again, it's about as transparent as can be. Daniel Day Lewis inhabits a character like no other. From his split ends to untrimmed toe nails, it is in his walk, his painfully earned gait. He's almost like Pan (in stature), half man half goat, you expect to see cloven hooves poking through his boots - it gets visibly worse as HW pulls away. It's not a big part, but Ciaran Hinds also acts part moral compass to Plainview. I really wish he had more storytime, he's such a gifted actor.