Saw this with my two sisters who could not have more opposite taste. I sat between them. One muttered under her breath all the way through…disgruntled, angry, sarcastic. She did not like this movie. The other one giggled nervously at all the same parts I was , stifling nervous laughter and fighting goosebumps. It’s hard to say “I liked this movie.” But I did not hate it at all.
It’s impossible to divorce the movie from the acting and the photography. The directing and the look and feel of the movie made me think of Terence Malick. Sort of Badlands and Days of Heaven…long silent shots, jarring dialog, and a hinky feeling that all is not well. And it’s not. There is almost no backstory to these characters that populate the early-California landscape.
As Daniel Plainview (protagonist played by Daniel Day Lewis) progresses along his path to becoming a severely disturbed misanthrope, I kept on asking myself, What is your problem? You never really find out, and I actually think it was better that way. His is a hard personality to get a bead on. But as bad as he is, nothing is worse than the Pentecostal young preacher who serves as his foil. So irritating, smarmy, smug, and cloyingly grotesque is this guy that I sort of understood Plainview’s dramatic reactionwhen they would meet. For my part, each time the preacher came on the screen, I would think, O please no. He’s sickening.
Plainview is murderous and hateful. The preacher is just contemptible.
Two things: The score is as jarring as the dialog. Hornets buzzing in your head alternating with fraught silences and discordant instrumental phrasing. Also, the dialog in this reflects the freaky madness that is brewing beneath the surface of these characters. They may look like normal people, but they do not talk like normal people. The dialog had me squirming and laughing nervously. Especially that last scene (“I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!”) F R E A K Y. Daniel Day Lewis is repellent and magnetic. No small feat. Totally watchable.
1 response so far ↓
jeff // February 19, 2008 at 11:13 pm
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this thing evoked interesting emotions at the most random times. i’ll say i loved the movie because i haven’t FELT during a movie the way i felt during this one. there were times when i thought i’d be sick, times when i was just plain disgusted, times when i was living vicariously through characters and internally LEEPING for joy. the story lines wandered a bit and didn’t tie to a nice tidy package at the end, and you talk
about no character arc (those guys started out dark and rocketed into the pit), but, mr. day-lewis created a beautiful piece of americana.
it was like howard hughes meets a clockwork orange. that last scene in the bolling alley was just a brilliant piece of movie making and
acting.
as a new father, and one who adopted his son, the story line with hw was especially painful to watch. watching the boy reach up for daniel’s face on the train had me on the verge of tears. that train…man, the beginning of trust in their relationship and also the end of it. watching hw trying to get off the train while daniel walked to his auto…painful.
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i enjoyed your comment about there being no back story to these characters. it reminded me of the pictures that you’d see from this period. odd characters dressed strangely with odd body positioning, odd looks on their faces, slack eyes, 11′ stare in a 10′ room. such was the experience with the prophet, the oilman, the ‘brother’.
i’m beginning to really respect movies that evoke emotion more than movies that may have a good story line or just good acting. if a movie makes me squirm, twists my insides, then it’s getting thumbs up from me. this one? it had me as uncomfortable as if i’d just drank from a well in coquiarachi.