vantage point: don't, for the love of god, see this movie

I made the mistake; you don't have to. Anyway, don't pay them anything if you do. If we keep giving them money for crap, crap is what they'll keep casting our way until we forget that we smell bad and start thinking it's normal.

This is one of those Convergence Films which have been so popular in recent years. As far as I can tell the trend was begun by the King of Convergence, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel) and picked up with some fervor by others. Crash is one such (the bad one, not the Cronenberg), a few Soderbergh films, also Emilio Estevez's Bobby and (I suspect; I haven't seen it) Anthony Minghella's widely-ignored Breaking and Entering. A Convergence Film follows the parallel development of several characters (or, in some cases which shall remain nameless for a few more scowling paragraphs, parallel NON-development of several THOUSANDS of NON-characters)whose fates are entwined momentarily by an impersonal occurence, generally an act of violence or a terrible accident.

I think we can blame the Brokeback Mountain crowd for this shameful betrayal of the art of movie-making. My theory is that if the gay cowboy folks hadn't been so self-righteous and vocal about how unquestionably their film deserved the Oscar (small matter if they were right; there's a certain decorum to be observed. You crow AFTER you win it, not before), then the Academy would have GIVEN it to them instead of taking umbrage and handing the statue to Crash, which was the tragedy that stole Convergence from the able hands of Mr. Inarritu and convinced the rest of the world that it was a good idea to give it a go. And it's not a good idea, not at all. Convergence Films are hard going, demanding imagination, a subtle touch, a strong intellect, a great editor, and a keenly-honed sensitivity to the delicately-shifting shades of strength and weakness which compose a human being. A well-done Convergence Film is primarily an exploration of character, not action.

But none of this has anything to do with the subject at hand, except in the relationship that an untouched target has with the arrow that misses it entirely. Vantage Point is a clodhopping, humorless mess built like a staggering house of cards out of long chains of absurd coincidences and held together with a mephitic glue of bombastic self-importance.

(At this point, I ought to give you a *SPOILER ALERT*, but I'm not going to, because there's nothing about his movie that can be spoiled. It's already rotten; it's vulture-grub; carrion-eaters only need apply.)

Nothing in this movie bears any relation whatsoever to the real world. No fault in that, unless your filmmaker is pretending that it is the real world, as this lousy filmmaker is. In a panicking crowd of hundreds, The Nice Guy (Forest Whitaker) with his little personal camera somehow manages to film every important incident happening in the huge plaza where an assassination attempt occurs. Mr. Big Terrorist Guy (Said Taghmaoui) carries a cellphone with which he can, with the push of a button from the back of a crowd, remotely aim and fire a rifle through a distant window which hits his target square in the chest. I suspect he bought it on the set of a Harry Potter film, since it is obviously a magical device, and can probably make a pastrami sandwich and do the dishes simultaneously. After killing hundreds in cold blood, from both distance and close quarters, he relinquishes success in the last moment to avoid running over a little girl in the street. (Only she's not really a little girl: she's a Plot Device disguised as a character. They all are.) Note to bad filmmakers everywhere: if you're going to make me swallow a foul-tasting plot-twist like that, you'd better damn well set it up firmly with major Bad-Guy's-a-Sucker-for-Little-Kids scenes early on.

But wait! There's more. Mr. Head-of-the-President's-Security-Team (Matthew Fox) turns out to be one of the dreadful terrorists, although it is never explained why he's up for killing the president or, indeed, how he climbed into his position of importance without ever having had a damn security check run on his treacherous ass. Even the little things are wrong: in the television production booth where we start out (I call it The Clumsy Exposition Module), Ms. Director (Sigourney Weaver) argues with Ms Prettyface Newscaster (Zoe Saldana) who has gone off-script with a tirade of her own devising. In the real world, that newscaster would be out on the street without a job. In this world, it's treated like a minor peccadillo. No matter, since the newscaster will be dead within a few moments. We know that because we can watch it from the booth, the discarded camera having very thoughtfully fallen so that it still films her gracefully prone body.

Crap. It makes me grumpy, just talking about it. Point is, it was written by someone who learned what the real world is not by living in it but by watching fair-to-middlin' episodes of "24". Except... wait! I forgot... It WASN'T written, not at all. It's a 12-page treatment that someone forgot to write a script for because they were too busy throwing money at it. This is how I figure it happened: they've got the director, they've got Quaid and Hurt, they've signed the international stars to give it faux-Inarritu credibility (the lovely and talented Eduardo Noriega, for one: utterly wasted), the caterers are hired, when some assistant coffee-pourer goes, "Hey, should we have a script?" For her pains, she's sent out to the picket-lines to scare up some poor schlub whose pre-strike job was probably polishing commas and apostrophes for a third-tier forensics show, a fellow who hasn't eaten for a few weeks. He punches out four or five pages of non-dialogue to stick in between explosions and car-chases, and voila! We have a non-film with which we can wring good money out of idiots like me who think, "Ah, what the hell, I'll give it a go. How bad can it be?"

in bruges, with a digression into colin farrell and his alexander

I'm so excited to see this one I could just spit. This being the hinterlands of Oregon (it's a big treat here when we cast a vote in a national election and some fellow is not already giving his acceptance speech by the time the polls close), God only knows when it'll get here. It opened at Sundance some weeks ago and audiences are divided. Some are raving, some are put off by the extreme entanglements of violence and humour... which is saying something in this post-Tarantino world.

This is Martin McDonagh's first full-length feature. The Irish playwright has been unofficial wunderkind on both sides of the theatrical pond these last ten years or so, his biggest hit to date being the dark, intense, and really like nothing else Pillowman which opened in London in 2003 with dreamcast-members Jim Broadbent and David Tennant, then two years later on Broadway with Billy Crudup and Jeff Goldblum. He has an interesting history: with no particular background in theatre, he wrote almost his entire canon in a London bedsit living on the dole. His sights turned to cinema with a short film called "Six Shooter" which he wrote and directed and because of which a little gold statue named Oscar now sits on his mantel. Netflix has got it on a DVD called, appropriately enough, the 2005 Academy Awards Short Films Collection, and it's a fine little piece of violence, mayhem, and the blackest of humours.

In Bruges promises more of the same. Well, it would be weird if it didn't. I don't think McDonagh's ever written anything that wasn't some muddle and twist of sadism, cruelty, horror and belly-laughs. And violence onstage is far more problematic than onscreen; it's right there, in the same room with you. I once saw a tiny community theatre play in which a father got drunk and raped his daughter onstage. OK... there's no way to watch that. Unless it's staged in a highly metaphorical way, the audience turns off, turns away, shuts it out; you've lost them. McDonagh manages to keep us with him in three ways: first off, much of the sadism is spoken, psychological rather than physical; it's mostly in the build-up. Secondly, nigh on nobody in McDonagh's world is a truly innocent victim; everybody has a skeleton in the old closet, everybody knows what's what. And finally, most importantly, he has spot-on timing with the comedy. He's better at this than Tarantino, who is hit-and-miss (I know a lot of people did, but I couldn't make the transition in Kill Bill, Vol. 1, jumping from the devastation of Uma rising from her coma and realizing she's lost her baby straight to the jackass horror jokes about vaseline from her brutalizing attendants). Tarantino tends too often toward the hamfisted, whereas McDonagh can follow a horrible brutality with a witticism so dry and strange and unexpected that he wins us back with his moxie and weird-ass charm.

Anyway, I'm half-crazed and salivating to see it. I'm a big Brendan Gleeson fan, and I would be a big Colin Farrell fan if he didn't make such crap films. He had me in the palm of his hand after the New World. I went back and watched everything of his I could get my hands on, and what I could get my hands on was a load of "he's-great-but-the-film-is-shite" shite. Joel Schumacher?! What the hell? That guy takes a gripping story like Veronica Guerin's, gets Cate Blanchett in the lead, surrounds her with fantastic Irish character actors and STILL manages to make a bad film. As for the rest of Farrell's resume, Alexander,for instance, I had high hopes--still do, actually, since there's a new version on Netflix that I'm praying has cured what ailed it, but those ailments were fairly elephantine. As always, not Farrell's fault--the fault for this one lies squarely on Oliver Stone's shoulders. In fact, let's have a digression on Alexander, shall we?

Every bio-film ever made has to choose one or two themes to focus on in the life of its protagonist, because you have to cut out 99.9% of even the shortest life... time strictures, you know. You tell the story in symbolic moments, chosen in relation to a few specific running conflicts. If the hero is a musician, usually a main theme is the conflict between partying and true love. If the person rises up from a minority group, it's the struggle to overcome the oppressive dominant culture. If she's a woman, it's the choice between family life and career. Big yawns all around. This is why I tend to avoid biopics. Even when they get good reviews, it's not because the script's great but because someone's doing a great impersonation, and I can go to a party for that.

Now, you go back as far as Alexander, you've got a different skein of confusion to unravel in order to find your few dominant themes. Here's one of the most famous men we've never seen a photo of, he lived a glamorous and violent life, died young and left a big legacy, his name on lots of towns in lots of countries. But, time and recorded history being the crapshoot they are, there are big holes in what we know. These holes get filled in with whatever's lingering around in the director/writer's psyche, and whatever bits of story that attracted him to the subject in the first place. Apparently what attracted Oliver Stone were Oedipal conflicts and homosexuality. The latter is approached from an isn't-it-naughty perspective, as if Stone had just discovered gayness and thinks it fascinating but keeps expecting to get his hand slapped by some nun with a ruler; the former is approached with blunderbuss volume eleven cartoonishness.

There are so many great things in this movie that it's a damnable shame he didn't find any recourse to subtlety in its interpersonal dynamics. (You want to see two of the sexiest humans in the world in an entirely unsexy love scene? Alexander and Roxanne on their wedding night.) It's got at least one of the best battle-scenes I've ever witnessed, his depiction of Gaugamela. It's so perfect: you get a real-time feeling for how long it takes to bring a phalanx around an enemy flank unseen, the difficulties of keeping in touch with all of your officers during the chaos. Stone uses a great tactic in the eagle: while Alexander is making his pre-battle pep-speech and I'm preparing to run into the kitchen because, let's face it, haven't we heard enough fiery once-more-into-the-breaches for one lifetime? suddenly the camera latches hold of an eagle and follows it up, out of range of the speech, flying across both armies to let us see the opening formation of the battle to come. Fantastic stuff. He obviously cares about the battles, and so do I, and so did Alexander, and if he'd focused more on that and less on the histrionics of the parental units and how roguish and wicked it is to be gay... ah, well. This is what I'm hoping for in this new and improved cut.

I mean, you gotta figure old Alex spent a good portion of his time figuring out strategy, having conquered the world and all. Consider Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence himself would've told you the warfare was his passion, and ultimately more important to him than the emotional contents of that psychodynamic well of neuroses and love affairs from which we tend to draw the contents of our biopics. David Lean trusted that and came up with a great film. The psychodynamics are there, but conveyed in undercurrents and the unspoken. You come away with a strong sense of what went on inside this enigmatic man without having been cudgeled across the noggin with it. Stone, on the other hand, takes an even more heroic subject and spends his two hours plus change cutting the fellow down to a size we can recognize instead of exploring what it was that made him great. AND we come away with an aching noggin.

All that said, and despite Hart's War, despite Home at the End of the World and SWAT, this boy Farrell's got gold in him and every now and then he's got to strike the vein, just according to the laws of probability. I'm confident that In Bruges is the one... the motherlode. I'll keep you posted.

trickster and the cattleman: 3:10 to yuma

*CAUTION: SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW. IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN IT YET, GO OUT AND DO SO NOW. WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?*

PART ONE. THE STORY

When the original Elmore Leonard story "Three-ten to Yuma" first appeared in Dime Western Magazine in 1953, it was not much more than ten pages long. It begins with a sheriff's deputy pulling up in front of a hotel in Contention, Arizona, with an outlaw in tow. The two spend the next several pages holed up in a hotel room before making a short and ultimately successful trip through town past the outlaw's gang to the railroad tracks. At no time does this prisoner assist his guard. It ends with the deputy hoisting his bad guy (who must have been a far tinier human than Russell Crowe) bodily into the train car and the bad guy himself admitting a grudging admiration for his captor.

It's a story of temptation, an unpretentious psychological drama focused on the personalities of two men, not an action story at all. There is reference to the hold-up of a stagecoach (in the story, the outlaw has already been tried), and also to the clever ruse (used in both films) the deputy used to throw the gang's scent off the trail, but we see neither. There are two bits of action we do see in the hotel room: once when the outlaw tries to make a break for it, one involving the brother of the dead stage driver (who, interestingly, the outlaw has been cleared of having killed; whereas in both films, we watch him commit the crime) who busts in with vigilanteism on his mind. When the moment of the final showdown arrives (and it is, really, only a moment), the outlaw's Man Friday yells for the boss to drop, the boss drops, but the deputy is the one who gets the lucky shot. The bulk and heft of the story, though, lies in the canny psychological tactics the brigand uses to try and talk his way out of his chains, and how very tempted the good guy is to acquiesce.

PART TWO. THE TRICKSTER

The story was first filmed in 1957, directed by Delmer Daves (Broken Arrow, the Last Wagon) using one of the Old West's greatest screenplays, by Halsted Welles, a man who wrote mostly for television. With Van Heflin as deputy Dan Evans, now become a struggling cattleman who's taken the job because his family's fallen on hard times, and Glenn Ford as badman Ben Wade, it's a near perfect film. Perfect, my boyfriend will tell you, except for the Lady-in-the-Buckboard scene, in which Evan's wife drives into Contention at the last minute to make sure her husband knows she loves him. It's a scene that messes with time, strains credulity, dips a toe into sentimental hogwash, adds nothing to the story and little to their characters. The single thing it DOES add, and it's arguable that this justifies its inclusion, is a quiet change in the Glenn Ford character, subtle and unspoken, as he watches the intensity of emotion between husband and wife, a change which will magnify to become a deciding factor later on.

Van Heflin had a huge talent for playing salt-of-the-earth farmers, with his big, physical presence and his knack for playing simple, non-introspective men without condescension. As for Glenn Ford, there had never been an outlaw as charming and relaxed as his Ben Wade, nor would there be again until Butch Cassidy came along a decade later. This is a man who enjoys life. He'll kill if he must, but it's not for sport or pleasure. When he shoots his own man along with the stagecoach driver, he does it quickly, instinctively, because it's necessary to get the job done (and without making a big, speechifyin' deal out of it like Russell Crowe's Ben Wade does). He loves life, and he loves women. This man is not just a player and a flirt--I mean, he's those things, too, but he genuinely loves women. Loves the perfumes and the sussurations of silk, the hair and the sound of feminine voices. Generally when left to muse unencumbered his thoughts will turn to the pleasures of feminine company, usually with a joyful nostalgia. You can hear it in his voice as he reminisces with the saloon girl about the canteen where she used to work, see it in his flirtation with Evans' wife, sense it while he listens to a woman's faraway song. And it's what gets him into trouble.
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"Behind trickster's tricks lies the desire to eat and not be eaten, to satisfy appetite without being its object. If trickster is initially ridden by his appetites, [sometimes] such compulsion leads him into traps..."
--Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World

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The genius of the first film lies in taking a hint from the short story and expanding Ben Wade into a full-fledged trickster figure. Some of the hallmarks of the trickster archetype include shapeshifting, agility, parasitism, thievery, cunning, versatility, skill at talking and lying, a leaning toward pranksterism, a sense of humor. He has a tendency to fall into his own traps, and an equal propensity for escaping from them after an adventure. According to Wikipedia, the trickster "...breaks the rules of the gods or nature, sometimes maliciously... but usually, albeit unintentionally, with ultimately positive effects." Ben Wade is captured because his weakness for women keeps him in town too long, and there is a wonderful scene in which Evans stalls him even longer in the saloon with a conversation that delightfully sets up both the cautious rivalry between the two and their tentative enjoyment of it, as evidenced by the look on Glenn Ford's face when he realizes he's been had.

PART THREE. THE BIG BAD KILLER

Compared to Russell Crowe's Wade, Ford's is less complex and, in the end, when he makes his shapeshifting transition, easier to believe. In last year's remake (directed by James Mangold), we find Ben Wade much changed. Crowe's Wade has been cartoonified into the coldest, Bible-quotin', power-manipulatin', sharp-shootin' psychokiller this side of the Pecos. The implication is that he is--or, rather, the REPUTATION he fosters bills him as--the Old West's equivalent of a sociopathic serial killer. We find out (and he does, too, to an extent) ultimately that he's not, although it's much too simple to claim he's a killer with a hidden heart of gold. He's far more than that, but you can't call him good. To balance his badness, this Wade has been given an artistic bent and a close bond with his horse (nobody who's all bad could be real friends with his horse), a wry sense of humor, and that watchful, always-engaging Russell Crowe intelligence. All in all, Crowe has a tough tightrope act to walk with this one, juggling all these factors, and the end result does him credit.

Near-perfect as the first film is, and imperfect as is the remake, it's the remake I love best. It's flawed, but it's a shindig, beginning to end. It pays its respects to the first film by using big chunks of its dialogue, then throws in an Apache attack, a barn-burning, an immolation, a psychological battle over the admiration of an impressionable youngster, the death of the Old West as symbolized by the coming of the railroad, a strait-laced, hard-shooting Pinkerton (the older he gets, the more Peter Fonda sounds and looks like his dad, and how good is THAT?), electrode-wielding vigilantes, the whole shebang and the kitchen sink. Where the short story commences in the town of Contention and the first film jumps from the posse leaving Evans' ranch to pulling into Contention, this one has a full forty minutes, maybe longer, of travelling between the two, in which folks get killed and get to know one another, escape and get recaptured. It's a romp. It's a shindig. Come on down.
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"Seizing and blocking opportunity, confusing polarity, disguising tracks--these are some of the marks of the trickster's intelligence... He can encrypt his own image, distort it, cover it up. In particular, tricksters are known for changing their skin. I mean this in two ways: sometimes tricksters alter the appearance of their skin; sometimes they actually replace one skin with another."
--Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World

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My friend Jeff said his big problem with the remake was that Wade's switcheroo at the end is so extreme (much more so than in the original) that we need to see, plainly and clearly, exactly where he makes the decision to jump the fence and come down on Evans' side. I kept this in mind during subsequent viewings and I think it's unclear because the decision, like most decisions of such enormity in life, is made in two moments instead of one, like a step forward then a temporary retreat before he sets the choice in stone. The first moment is when he tells Evans about the time he read the Bible at the train station; the second when Evans tells him how he lost his leg. The first moment establishes that a certain intimacy has been offered, a certain trust that we know, more than Evans does, is unusual for Wade. The second is the returning of that trust, which changes the tide and the end of the story.

PART FOUR. THE RANCHER

When you ask someone who's the best actor alive, they usually say Ian McKellen, sort of automatically, the way people used to say Olivier. Some might branch off into musings about Daniel Day-Lewis or Ralph Fiennes. But in twenty years, when Sir Ian has followed Glenda Jackson into Parliament and Daniel Day-Lewis has retired to a tiny island off Ireland to live in the ruins of a monastery sacked by Vikings in the 12th century, a place without electricity or running water where he shears his own sheep, lives off mutton and berries and leads the most fantastically joyful and visionary life any man ever has, people will answer the question, "Who's the best actor working?" with the words Christian Bale.

Bale is smart and disciplined and seemingly without fear or unhealthy ego needs. Engaging and likable as Crowe is, and as much as we all love spending time with him, it's Bale who gives the standout performance here. His Dan Evans has been modified in that he lost his leg fighting for the Union, and the scriptwriter turns this to lovely advantage in two places: early on when he ruefully tells his wife that if they'd taken a few more inches off they'd have given him an extra few hundred dollars, then in a great turn-around moment of revelation in the hotel room when he likens the money he's being offered to abandon the job to the money the government gave him for the loss of his leg--money that lets the giver off the hook, buys them the freedom to turn away. From the first moments to the last, Bale skillfully avoids the pitfalls of sentimentality and self-righteousness, giving us a full-bodied, three-dimensional man whose integrity is ultimately more admirable because it is consistently tested and in question.

POSTSCRIPT. CHARLIE PRINCE

A last word should be spoken about Charlie Prince, the outlaw's faithful right-hand man, a great character in both films. Played by Richard Jaeckel in the original with mischief and humor, he's very much a Ben Wade-in-training. In the remake, Ben Foster gives us a dandified badass with an ugly habit of gut-shooting folks so they die slow. He's harboring a seriously romantic case of hero-worship for his boss which results in unwavering loyalty and some of the movie's crazier bloodshed. The moment that pulls his performance from very good up into very, very good comes with the line, "You boys some kind of posse?" It looks simple on the page, but he wields it with a wicked, twisting underplay that turns it into a classic.

resquiat in pace

things i've been watching: february edition

Deep Water: (2006, dir: Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell) Startlingly poignant documentary about the vanishing of Donald Crowhurst. From the little I knew before, I'd supposed he was some kind of charlatan, and I could not have been more wrong. DVD includes great extras including separate pieces on each of the other sailors in the race and an exploration of his yacht, complete with personal tape recorded messages.

the Skeleton Key: (2005, dir: Iain Softley) Bad juju at the old plantation house. One assumes that Gena Rowlands, John Hurt, Kate Hudson and Peter Saarsgard all signed on for a free trip to New Orleans, in what must have been one of the last films with pre-Katrina footage. Most of it takes place in a fantastic old house in Terrebone Parish, with trips into town. Great ending, great actors, great to be in voodoo country, but it's missing something crucial in its build-up. Too much flash, not enough creeping physicality, maybe.

Bullitt / Dirty Harry double-feature: THAT's what I'm talking about. How did I get so old without ever having seen the two classic SF cop films? There are times when Steve McQueen gets too cute for my taste, or too self-consciously cool. This, my friends, is not one of them; he gives us Frank Bullitt simply and seriously, without one muscle-movement too many or too few. Keep your eyes peeled during the famous car-chase sequence for the Little Green Volkswagen Bug, which shows up far more often than it ought to. There may be a drinking game in that somewhere. As for the Eastwood film, I have one question: what kind of asshole sends Harry Callahan up on a crane to talk down a jumper?

Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater: (2006, dir: Julie Anderson) The man who was once the leading liberal nightmare and the very face of conservative politics is examined in this documentary by one of his grandchildren. The upside of family involvement is the access: to home movies, to dream interviewees from Hillary Clinton to Sandra Day-O'Connor to John McCain to Al Franken. The downside is that everyone's a little more polite than they might otherwise be. It's an interesting portrait, particularly in that his own party would probably reject him today. Here's a man who's against anti-abortion and anti-gay legislation, against welfare, against the Civil Rights Act, all for the same reason: because the government should keep its grubby fingers out of our personal lives and leave the states to take care of themselves as they see fit. He makes it clear, too, that he's appalled by the flirtations between church and state he sees infiltrating the republican party. Even those of us who get jumpy about his policies (there was that "we've got it so let's use it" attitude toward the nuclear bomb, and... OK... he's AGAINST the Civil Rights Act?) will find the man a breath of fresh air in one respect: that he has so little Politician in him. It seems near impossible for him to say a thing he doesn't really think, and isn't that a mind-expanding idea? I dug it. Informative and nostalgic in equal measures.

telluric slime for capitalist pigdogs: there will be blood

This one is magnificent. We plunge straight in: no credits, just a black title card then a shot of a desolate mountain range, creepified by some very tense music. The music is as big and true an element in this movie as the landscape, which is considerable. Johnny Greenwood's score, weirdly overlooked by Oscar, has been called intrusive by a few, hailed for its originality by most. It's a bold move, placing the soundtrack so high in the mix, but it works. Much soundtrack music annoys because it tells you what to feel--witness the syrupy swells in Spielberg films, the fanfare bombardments in action flicks. This one succeeds because it inspires the emotions instead of dictating them. I don't remember the last time I've been so tense for two and a half hours, largely due to Greenwood. And I mean that in the very best way.

The next brave and wonderful thing is that the first... what? ten minutes? maybe twenty? who keeps track of time when one's shoulders are up around one's ears in anxious concentration? Anyway, the first big chunk of film is entirely without dialogue, the only few words being muttered by a character to himself. It's all visual (and musical), and encapsulates the backstory of Daniel Plainview, the man who will be our anti-hero, from his early days as a solitary prospector for silver up through the nascent stages of his oil-drilling business. One of the separating factors between a great director and a fair one is the ability--compulsion, even--to tell a story as much as possible without words. This bit works beautifully, communicating the extreme dangers and drudgeries and exhilarations of one hard-hearted man's quest for riches, also introducing us to his adopted son, HW Plainview, a boy he inherits after an accident kills his partner. When we do, at last, hear words spoken, it is in lightning cut, with Daniel Day-Lewis' commanding and falsely comforting John Huston voice giving us (and, we see after a minute, an audience of townspeople) what we will learn is his regular spiel. It is a speech of the sort we've all heard delivered by good-old-boy politicians to varying effect, and this time it's very persuasive indeed. He's a family man. He'll pour money and resources into building up the town. He can promise expertise in drilling their oil, and because he owns his own equipment, he'll cut out the middleman, leaving more for both driller and town. Elect me, and everybody wins.

OK, I'll leave off describing it. But hear this: it'd be a shame to miss this one on the big screen. Once you get it in your DVD player, the temptation will be great to dispel the crushing tension by pausing, making beer runs, interspersing with bits of "Law and Order" or whatever formulaic (and therefore comfortably mitigating) thing is showing on television. Far better to seat yourself in the dark theatre and let it take you by force. Because the space in this film is vast and epic, not only in landscape but also in story, the moments of violence feel more severe than in your basic cartoon action venture. When the violence comes, both physical and psychological, it is sudden and harsh, and credit goes to both Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel-Day Lewis for pulling what might have been a sort of failed circus act up into sheer magnificence.

As with all the very finest things in life, audience reactions are mixed. The first time I saw it, the whole house sat in sort of fagged admiration at the end, letting the credits roll by in a mixed fog of enthusiasm and bone-weariness. When I saw it again a few days later, a young couple left, apparently out of boredom, about halfway through it, then an older man in front stood up during the histrionic (but CLASSIC!) final scene, shook his head at all of us, and walked out. Once it was done, a woman a few rows back began ranting about how awful it was, how she had to sit for a spell to cleanse herself of it, how it didn't make any SENSE. My feeling was that she meant she was uncomfortable to the point of panic at having been so intimately involved with a character who was three-dimensional, filled with complexity, whose selfishness was undeniable but seemed not simple or easy to condemn, yet who consistently chose to cut himself further away from humanity, past any chance of redemption. (If that seems like a lot of supposing, I'd be willing to entertain the possibility that I was doing a little projecting.) And the blame for THAT lies squarely with Daniel Day-Lewis and his ridiculously complete mastery of his damned craft. Send him his Oscar right now. No other performance compares to this. The game-legged walk, growing incrementally worse as he ages; those eyes which communicate both thought and emotion even when his face is shaded or utterly still; the way we know exactly what he's thinking all the time yet all the time know for a fact we'll never really plumb the depths of this fellow; the fact that he's abhorrent to our sensibilities and yet, like the panicky lady in the audience that night, we find it damnably difficult to revoke our empathies from him... It's a performance that traverses the widest distance between subtlety and bombast and back again, often in a moment. Hell, I'd give him the Oscar for the baptism scene alone, which, incidentally, is also wonderfully shot, the camera unobtrusive and unwavering, so that, like him or not, we suffer and triumph alongside our blackguard protagonist.

When I walked out of the cinema after the first viewing, it was with a malingering sense that not only did I never want to drive a car or set foot in a church ever again, I never wanted to buy ANYTHING, ever, since the whole capitalist system is a perverse and seductive slaughterhouse. Big huzzahs for Upton Sinclair; job well done there (although, granted, I beat the conviction down quickly enough). The second time through the author's biases snapped into focus for me during the last scene (that fantastic scene!), as if he were standing on a soapbox next to me, whispering, "Capitalism is evil and necessarily corrupts. Oh, also, the Church is only big business in disguise."

Doesn't matter. It's magnificent. Go see it.