160 minutes of overacting, overdirecting, set appropriately to a distracting overbearing score. Reviewed here in an appropriately wordy style.
Part of it is that I guess I’m simply not a fan of Daniel Day-Lewis; I first enjoyed his portrayal of Natty Bumpo immensely. Since then I’ve watched him in Gangs of New York, My Left Foot, Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Age of Innocence…and in every one I’ve practically winced through his performance. There are some great actors who play roles effortlessly, slipping into roles without us ‘noticing’ that they’re an actor. DDL is precisely the opposite – he is clearly working so terrifically hard to ‘be’ whoever he’s playing, and it seems that we’re meant to notice. It’s the acting equivalent to deliberately coloring outside the lines so we can see what neat crayons he’s using. Perhaps it’s a self-conscious theatricality that plays better on a stage & footlights, but somehow he’s managed to overact even larger-than-life, bombastic roles like The Butcher in GoNY, or this character Daniel Plainview in TWBB.
In TWBB the first problem is that it’s derived from an Upton Sinclair story, Oil!, so we expect that we’re going to see a sermon on the evils of capitalism. Ironically, this turns out to be one of the lesser ills, as the director used only the basic setting and (according to IMDB) about 150 pages of the novel as source material – the rest is made from whole cloth. I’ll therefore actually reserve judgment on Sinclair’s contribution to this until I actually read the story myself.
The film starts very promising; roughly the first 10 minutes of the movie are entirely without dialogue, and tell a solid, interesting prologue over the span of a decade before the first words flow. Unfortunately, the first words are jarring: despite the character’s origins in Fon-du-Lac, WI, DDL allegedly chose the director John Huston as his vocal model. Odd, as Huston was from Nevada and his cadences were utterly non-Midwestern. More importantly, he had a characteristic method of speaking that was both pretentious and artificial; it was precise, over enunciated, and almost as if he was always reading a script for transcription. If you’ve never heard it, you might instead remember Bugs Bunny’s line from Space Jam “I’m a Shakespearean Actor!” – pretty much the same delivery. It could be that DDL was going precisely for this, some sort of grand huckster-showman delivery with a fourth-wall wink to the audience that everyone else in the movie seems to be “buying it”, something that simply doesn’t work on film.
At first I thought this was an actual biography; characters drift in and out, growing or losing importance based on seeming externalities to the story that are never explained. It may be an effort at realism. Unfortunately what can be forgiven in a portrayal of reality (which necessarily must be somewhere bounded to fit into a retelling) ends up just being chaos on the screen. Who are these people? Is he important? Wait, where did he come from? Certainly we care nothing for this parade of shadows that voice a few lines and then depart. His adoptive son, HW, is potentially a meaningful character – Plainview adopts him after one of his early workers is killed, leaving the boy an orphan. In the book, he’s apparently adopted for his usefulness - dragged along much as a showpiece, a hood-ornament displaying Plainview’s “family” nature. This isn’t successfully brought into the film; he’s shadowing behind Lewis, trailing along mostly ignored but then occasionally the object of real (apparent) affection. Why? Does he really love the boy? Like Plainview’s occasional bursts of violence and temper, these are seemingly inserted randomly, apparently meant to give the characters some “depth”. Unfortunately, complexity without consistency – allowing the audience to build a semblance of logic behind it – just comes off as incoherence.
The actor (Paul Dano) who had apparently already been shot in early scenes as Paul Sunday (whose revelation to Plainview about oil on his family’s property really is the initial dramatic incident of the film), was allowed to also play the “other brother” Eli Sunday, the director rationalizing that they happened to be identical twins. Ironically, this spins the audience a hint of subtle dramatic promise – when Plainview, having bought the information after a tense negotiation with Paul, goes surreptitiously to inspect the property under the guise of quail hunting, he meets Eli. To all appearances, it’s the same young man that sold him the information, yet Eli acts as if he’s never met Plainview before? Was Paul a false name? Is Paul/Eli playing some sort of double game against his father, the property owner? Regrettably, we eventually figure out that it’s not drama; it’s confusion and director laziness. No, Eli the religiously-obsessed stay-at-home son who is takes the role of the community antithesis to Plainview (never quite so clearly delineated as such, either) just HAPPENS to be the identical twin to the opportunistic and canny Paul, who never shows up again in the film.
Part of it is the character of Daniel Plainview – Sinclair is writing very much as an anti-Rand (aynti-Rand?) highlighting the deliberate isolation and loneliness of the wealth- and power-obsessed. Unfortunately, while showing how Plainview travels alone through life the director is too successful –he’s cut off from the audience too. We simply don’t care what happens to him. He neither kicks the dog to make a proper villain, nor demonstrates any character development that might make him an anti-hero. Like John Galt he starts out as a 2d caricature of obsession, stays a 2d character of obsession, and ends a 2d character of obsession.
Finally, not least – I had to make some mention of the horrible scoring. The best movie scores enhance the picture, building drama at dramatic scenes, suspense at suspenseful scenes, etc. Bad scores make you notice the emotional manipulation by ham-handed and overloud themes that blatantly attempt to coerce you into feeling a way that the film fails to. The worst score, I discovered with TWBB, would be one that is so repeatedly ham-handed and overloud that not only are you not moved, but they blare into oversaturation and annoyance. I can’t recall another movie in recent memory that caused me to reach for the ½ mute button for minutes on end, to wait until some apparently dialogue made it worth bringing up the sound again.
I rarely do this, but I confess I stopped watching after an hour and a half, with more than an hour left in the picture. I freely admit that I may have missed some great last-reel payoff that caused the entire film to dramatically coalesce into some great work of art that justified the entire experience. I submit that I doubt it – I disbelieve that a director could make the bulk of a movie so painful and boring without hinting at some signs of brilliance that would suggest a smooth resolution. If they were there, I certainly missed them. Boy, did I miss them.
