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.