Last night I saw the 3rd of the Best Picture nominees that I’ve seen, and probably the last of the front runners. (I just don’t think that Michael Clayton or Atonement were buzz-worthy enough to get into the running, but I’ll probably check Entertainment Weekly’s annual Oscar odds anyway.) Juno is probably out of the three, so that leaves No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. My money, for what it’s worth, is on the former, because it’ll seem like the Coen brothers’ time, and after watching There Will Be Blood, which I saw last night, you get the strong impression that Paul Thomas Anderson will be getting better with time, and have a lot more chances. Ont he surface, the two front-runners look remarkably alike. They’re both set in the beautifully desolate deserts of the Western U.S., and they’re both about degraded humanity. Both made me defensive about the mountainous desert area of the country I grew up in, which is not as depicted in the movies, a bloodless symbol of decay. Only 3/4 of the time. Except Phoenix, which is all the time.
But beyond the surface, these movies are wildly different. The Coen brothers decided to tackle the overlarge themes and insane levels of violence by dwelling on ambiguity, and the movie ends up being more about itself than directly about the themes tackled.* It’s unsettling and unsatisfactory, and put off much of the audience. When I saw No Country, the audience sat in silence for like a minute after it was over, and then the grumbling started. I’ll say now what I said then—people like their post-modernism delivered in the form of comedy.
In contrast, there was applause and a visceral excitement at the end of There Will Be Blood. The movie is based on the book Oil! by Upton Sinclair, which probably influenced Anderson’s choice to just make his movie a straightforward fable of American capitalism, a la Citizen Kane. Faced with the problem of wanting to tell a straightforward fable in an era that’s suspicious of such things, Anderson chooses to add weight to each anvil, making everything so over-the-top that it can be read as sufficiently meta. It’s a hard trick to pull, and I’d be skeptical if you could do it right before I saw it, but damn, he pulls it off. The only anvil that gave me pause was a shot of Day-Lewis, covered in oil, staring at an oil fire and looking like a demon. But it fit an overall commitment to over-the-top storytelling that manages to work. I’m still trying to figure out how he pulled it off.
The storyline that dominates the previews is the battle between Daniel Day-Lewis’s character Daniel Plainview and Paul Dano’s character Eli Sunday. Their names alone clue you into the utter lack of subtlety in this movie. Daniel Plainview: Last name quite indicative of a certain temper with the bullshit of the world, and the first name that of the Biblical prophet who did his time in the dominant culture of his time, only to become a Jewish prophet. Eli Sunday: Sunday is the holy day of Christians and his day, Eli is an Old Testament judge. Their story is, and you can tell this from the previews, a fable of the clash between religious dominance and capitalist dominance , and the timing couldn’t be better, since this is coming out as the Republican party is trying to keep from unraveling as these two groups deck it out. What made me really happy was that Anderson makes the very unusual choice of not trying to split audience sympathy between the two. Plainview is an evil uber-capitalist, sure, but Sunday is a piece of excrement who preys on people’s deepest needs. Plainview wheels and deals and deceives, and he’s an amoral fuck, but as his name implies, he’s not that much of a liar. Oh, he tells shallow lies that are immediately revealed. But Sunday’s entire life and the source of his power is based on one long-term lie about god and salvation, a lie that distorts and poisons the people who are lied to in a way that Plainview’s just-business deceptions don’t have the power to do. Plainview is a wild animal intent on destroying everything in sight for his own gain, but Sunday is a sociopath. But even if you weigh the characters against each other differently than I did, the movie leaves no audience member in doubt about who Anderson thinks will decisively win when religious dominators and capitalist dominators finally go toe-to-toe. You walk away vaguely ashamed that you ever thought it might not be a blow-out.
But strangely, the struggle between them is almost a subplot. The movie is about all aspects of Plainview’s decrepit life as an oilman, and in just sheer screentime, his relationship with his adopted son is more the main plot of the movie. In this, I was also impressed. I’m usually impatient and unconvinced by most cinematic story-telling about the relationship between parents and children, but the relationship of the elder and younger Plainviews is rendered so well, that you get deeply invested. You go in expecting a movie that’s mostly about the clash of power in the modern era, and you get a love story. The religion vs. capitalism cage fight is painted in broad, satisfying strokes, but the larger story about the place of genuine human connection in a capitalist system is a subtle, troubling story. It’s not overly ambiguous, either—Anderson isn’t going to insult your intelligence by pretending that things could shake out any way but how they do—but it leaves you with the sense that the things that are real out there might have a fighting chance against the capitalist beast. Religion won’t, of course, because it’s got no foundation of truth to it. But love and human connection can create a genuine challenge.
I predict that Day-Lewis will get the Best Actor Oscar, too. First of all, they love over-the-top performances. For once, though, so do I. Being capitalism distilled isn’t something that you render subtly, so his scenery-chewing actually works pretty damn well.
*After seeing this movie, I finally realized how that’s been the Coen brothers’ overarching project, to make a series of movies that are fundamentally about narrative itself. No Country For Old Men had an ending that echoes nothing but the end of Raising Arizona. In a way, they’re kind of the same movie.
46 Responses to “There will be entertainment”
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i like d.day lewis, but cant bring myself to sit through another p.t. anderson movie. he just is not a good movie maker & i really doubt that he has any potential left in him, at this point. which is a shame, because he picks interesting stories….& then just frustrates you by failing to deliver a cohesive story. and ironically, i think his big downfall is in not being able to get the characters to connect to each other, & in turn the audience. watching his movies is like expecting to hear a song but instead having to listen to the pianist striking the wrong chord every 5minutes.
I’ve seen 3 of the 5 movies up for noms (Atonenment, Juno, and No Country For Old Men), but I’m going again when AMC shows all 5 of them on 23rd. $30, free popcorn and drinks? Count me in!
I loved Atonement, actually. Especially the last 5 minutes. I don’t understand the sale of the love story though. It wasn’t so much about that to me, but whatev.
I love No Country for Old Men, EXCEPT.
-The scene where the main character is gets killed. I just like him so much! Not really a critique for the movie, but just my opinion
-The ending. I don’t have a problem with endings that don’t tie up, but the ending seemed like such a surprise. I guess I just don’t understand suprise endings. I wasn’t even quite sure what was going on in the last scene. But I’ll see it again, I’m sure it’ll clear up for me.
Juno I loved. Even when she was too smart.
I can’t wait to see “There Will Be Blood”. I love D.D. Lewis!
Atonement will win. You heard it here first.
Auguste, your source for hubristic predictions since
yesterday1975.My reaction to previews for There Will Be Blood:
“Daniel Day-Lewis is playing Bill the Butcher again? I loved that performance! Here’s hoping they give him a coherent movie to do it in this time.”
Hey Roxie, thanks for the spoiler warning on NCFOM.
>|^P
I would recommend reading both Atonement and No Country for Old Men. While obviously very different from each other, both are excellent books. So good, in fact, that it doesn’t matter that you’ve already seen the movie. There is much more to either of them than their plot. Read them to savor the language and ponder more deeply the questions posed.
I thought “No Country” was excellent, especially in the face of a very muddled source material. The starting stort was a bunch of playing with themes, fate, chance whatever, and of course never took a stand, even while straining in multiple directions. Deeply, deeply opaque and very literary, they made it seem as real as it could, hence a huge disconnect for many viewers, because they didn’t realize that they were watching a book and that the film was steeped in a literary unreality that did not mesh with the verite of the film. I think Brolin was key to the realness of the movie, while TLJ’s character was obviously still in the book.
“TWBB” was very very good, but quite airless. A massive amount of detail was left unstated and almost not even implied. This was a deeply minimalist film. I think it was wonderful, but think bluebonnet above’s reaction is kind of true in the extreme. I think he hits all the right notes, but doesn’t connect them, perhaps this is a masterpiece of storytelling, or maybe it’s PTA’s blindspot.
Michael Clayton was actually pretty good. I think they dropped the ball in a couple of minimal areas, and I think Gilroy did a good job, but I wonder if someone like Jonathan Demme would have been an excellent candidate.
So, most movies have a scene or two before the opening credits. They’re often over-the-top, especially the soundtrack. They’re minimalist, seeking to set the characters and mood as quickly as possible.
I think There Will Be Blood takes place entirely in that space.
Blue, that’s what I thought. This movie completely changed my mind. He went from being a terrible, empty movie maker to a genuinely interesting one.
Roxie, the ending is what makes or breaks No Country. I can’t imagine trying to judge it separate from the ending. It was basically saying, “We just told you this story, and all stories are fundamentally B.S., but we like to hear them anyway.”
I will add that this movie is a great pre-Super Tuesday viewing. It’ll add pleasure to watching the evil capitalist Republicans drink sanctimonious prick Huckabee’s blood for daring to defy them.
I’ve seen 4 out of the 5 - NCFOM, TWBB, Michael Clayton, and Juno.
I loved Juno while I was watching it and later came to have some serious reservations about the way it stacked the deck to make teen pregnancy seem about as disruptive as dying your hair pink.
Michael Clayton was a great piece of Hollywood entertainment. I mean that as a compliment - it was a movie, rather than a “film,” and I liked that it didn’t aspire to or pretend to be more than that, but was just a fun, well-acted thriller.
No Country and There Will Be Blood both disappointed me. I’d heard such great things about them, but they both left me cold. The acting in There Will Be Blood was fabulous, but I thought the end was inexplicable except as a parable of the contemporary republican party.
I thought No Country was, frankly, pointless. I think the Coen brothers rely overmuch on accents and caricatures, and I felt like they used the hit man as a kind of deus ex machina, rather than as an actual character. I realize their point is that there is no point, it’s all just senseless, but I didn’t think this movie was an effective vehicle for that message.
So, of the four, I guess I’d like Juno to win. Especially since it’s the only one that passes the Alison Bechdel rule.*
*Alison Bechdel Rule for movies: 1. It must have 2 or more female characters… 2. …who talk to each other… 3 …About something other than a man.
Wow, the review makes me want to see the movie. It sounds *a LOT* like the power struggle between Ali/Fatima, Aisha, and Muawiyah when Uthman was murdered and the schism between Sunni and Shiite began. Muawiyah, as the money and power guy, vs Ali and Fatima (who have always struck me as something of a fanatic), with Aisha caught in the middle…
The reward was power, money, and faith!
[OT] *** break break break *** Fox News Sunday Bill Kristol: “Look, the only people for Hillary Clinton are the Democratic establishment and white women. The Democratic establishment — it would be crazy for the Democratic Party to follow an establishment that’s led it to defeat year after year. White women are a problem, that’s, you know — we all live with that.” [/OT]
I saw ‘There will be blood’ yesterday and it just didn’t do it for me. I just wasn’t convinced that Daniel Plainview was actually greedy. His workers seemed pretty loyal to him and him to his workers. He worked hard and didn’t shirk responsibility. The only thing he seemed to have animosity towards was Eli Sunday, who was a fake anyways. I just wasn’t convinced that enough happened in his life to make him sufficiently angry to do what he did at the end. The book explored much different themes and while similarly contrived in having everybody in the Sunday family become representations of the different movements in America at the time, it at least acknowledged the humanity of capitalists if not capitalism.
“White women are a problem, that’s, you know — we all live with that.”
I wonder why he limits his comment to white women. Surely ALL women are a problem - with that no-penis thing and that nasty vagina…
Faux Knews - Bigotry isn’t just tolerated, it’s required!…
I want to see TWBB, but PTA movies really take it out of me. I was so wound up after Punch Drunk Love it took me a day to totally relax. He does unrelenting tension better than any other director I’ve ever seen.
Really, Punch Drunk Love was an extraordinary movie..and the only valid use of Adam Sandler as an actor ever.
Please put a warning up that there are spoilers in the discussion!!!
I think No Country for Old Men deserves to win the Oscar, but There Will Be Blood is the one I’m putting my money on. Daniel Day-Lewis, at least I think, deserves the best actor Oscar, but if Javier Bardem does not get the Oscar for his terrifyingly awesome performance as Chiguhr, I’m calling out-and-out fraud.
DDL deserves the Oscar for nothing else than the final scene with Paul Dano. That was an amazing performance to end the movie with.
Betsy: I think the end is what made the movie. By turning it up to 11, he made it clear that the rest of the movie being played at 10 wasn’t your typical stupid Hollywood melodrama and scenery-chewing, but a grand artistic statement. It was a parable throughout, from the way that the preacher isn’t granted his wish to give a blessing to the way that Plainview had to prostrate himself before Sunday to get his business done.
Plainview, except for the certain explicit crimes depicted was only a sociopath on the inside- this was the point. He could say and do all the right things, but his inner workings were disturbing, and they would bubble forth and explode under certain circumstances. I have to disagree with the rout of religion by capitalism, religion has always been something of a capitalistic entity, they aren’t so different. Mergers, acquisitions, spinning off companies. In this case, Sunday loses because he didn’t have basic facts/technology on his side. In our current form of capitalism, we have a very nice synthesis of the two, we have capitalism as religion. The God of the Market, and in the cases of the many, many situations where the market simple cannot or will not predict or adapt, we have a failure in the face of reality or science. Think global warming, think subprime collapse. We have nothing but failures of magical thinking.
I think TWBB was as more “empty” than Magnolia, it is just that the themes are easier for the audience to fill in. I also very much enjoyed “Punch Drunk Love.” I think PTA fucked up on one aspect of the final scene in TWBB, and I would have loved if he had included an interlude of Eli’s radio preaching- I would have expected an almost Hitler-ian froth, and I think he left some juice on the table. I think this would have evened out a tiny bit of the competition between Plainview and Sunday, given that the final scenes cap the two threads of film.
Good point. The radio thing ended up being a throwaway joke that went over the heads of anyone who doesn’t know about the 20s radio preaching.
This is an excellent review, Amanda. I was wondering if you think “Paul” was really Eli’s twin or some kind of alter ego. Regardless, I think the similarity in appearance of the two can provide some insight into the schizophrenic nature of the Religious Right, who (before the major rift we are seeing now) firmly supported the most rapacious aspects of capitalism and consumerism in the name of the anti-materialistic prophet Jesus Christ.
This is an excellent review, Amanda. I was wondering if you think “Paul” was really Eli’s twin or some kind of alter ego. Regardless, I think the similarity in appearance of the two can provide some insight into the schizophrenic nature of the Religious Right, who (before the major rift we are seeing now) firmly supported the most rapacious aspects of capitalism and consumerism in the name of the anti-materialistic prophet Jesus Christ.
I think it was an alter ego, sort of. You never see him again, so two faces of the same person. What I got from the movie was the sense that the religious right collapses the true believer and the huckster into the same thing, so they are indistinguishable. See: James Dobson, Mike Huckabee.
Amanda:
It sounds like we are on a very similar wavelength with this film. The minute my wife and I walked out of the theater, I turned to her and exclaimed, “Was it just me, or did I just see an allegory for the struggle of the corporatist and fundamentalist wings of the Republican Party, and the eventual victory of the latter?”
TWBB absolutely shows off how much Anderson has seasoned as a director over time. There were moments in the film that were so monstrously tense and oppressive that I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. The way Anderson moves the camera around is just hypnotic, and light-years beyond the entertaining, fluffy showiness in Boogie Nights and Magnolia (which I liked, but now seem inferior compared to TWBB.)
My full review here:
http://gatewaycinephiles.com/2008/01/24/review-there-will-be-blood/
Er, I meant “victory of the former.”
when the plainviews first meet the sundays at the ranch, I wasn’t paying close attention to the father enumerating the members of his family. I think this one scene is the only clue as to the Paul/Eli conundrum, but I like this part of the film and felt it was some layering in a deeply sparse film.
“See: James Dobson, Mike Huckabee.”
Exactly. I also liked that though one side “wins” through brute force in the end, he’s still “finished” and the servant (a person lower on society’s totem pole) is the one who has to clean up after the mess created by capitalism and religion. Pretty prophetic, IMO, concerning the coming times ahead.
Sorry about the double post.
No Country felt really insubstantial to me… I felt like it built up all of this momentum, and then it just evaporated. I don’t like reading spoilers accidentally on blogs like this, so I wont get into specifics, but during the last twenty minutes, I was straining to keep myself from screaming because I was bored out of my mind, hoping against hope that something would make sense out of what had just happened… that it would somehow stand for something and make me feel something, but that just wasn’t the case. I ended up feeling hollow and a little angry.
However, at the end of There Will Be Blood, I was just filled with shock and awe. The movie was just meaty and beautiful right up until the end, which, oddly, I didn’t see coming. It gave me a lot to think about. I won’t be forgetting it any time soon. I shared the confusion of some others as to the distinction between Eli and Paul Sunday. It wasn’t until after the movie, thinking back on all of the clues, that I realised that they were brothers. I still don’t know, though, what became of Paul (apart from Plainview’s description at the end), but it’s not terribly important.
Juno was great, it really was, and it deserves some accolades, but I’m just not feeling the movie of the year thing. I’m surprised it was nominated.
Haven’t seen Atonement, yet.
I took TWBB totally differently. TWBB was about the circuitous nature of divine retribution. The entire life of Daniel was an enormous means of setting up Eli. The whole story was just a sideshow to the final moment.
I mean, “I AM THE THIRD REVELATION! *I* AM THE THIRD REVELATION!”
Made me realize that there was a first and a second.
It would be awfully nice if the comment containing a massive spoiler could be edited to indicate that fact.
My best friend and I were discussing how surprisingly quotable “There Will Be Blood” ended up being. I think it all stems from Daniel Day-Lewis’s over-the-top-itude. It’s not just us, either; we run a trivia night, and before we’d seen the movie, a team had named themselves “I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!” My personal preference leans toward “Bastard in a basket!” It’s my new curse. By the way, in the book Oil! (which is so different as to not even be comparable; I’m reading it right now) Paul is 16, and kind of a vagabond. He’s run away from home, because his dad has gone holy roller nutjob, and his 15-year-old brother, Eli, has “the spirit.” And the names “Plainview” and “Sunday” are nowhere to be found. And the kid’s name is Bunny. Heh.
I can’t believe I’m the first to mention the score from TWBB, which drives the film as much as the actual images. Genre-breaking stuff from Johnny Greenwood, a guitarist from that little band named Radiohead (it would have been a shoe-in for an Oscar, but he composed much of it for other purposes, alas). I found this to be the most stark difference between TWBB and NCFOM, which had no score whatsoever. But somehow the absence of sound and the overwhelming presence of sound produces similar affects.
DDL the evil uber-capitalist vs. Javier Bardem the murderous entrepeneur. What a good year for film.
Amanda –”all stories are fundamentally B.S.”? That’s the thesis you get just because the Coens thwart our desire for a triumphantly macho conclusion? You can’t go to see a Coen brothers movie and expect either The Untouchables or The Searchers. I think your response vindicates the Coens’ implicit argument about what Texans can conceive of as “stories.”
NCFOM echoes the Coens’ earlier work, Fargo. Indeed, the last scene is, I thought, a direct flashback to Marge Gunderson’s soliloquy to Gaear Grimsrud, as she drives him into Brainerd for arraignment:
“So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper? And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’t you know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day. Well, I just don’t understand it. ”
It was a commentary of the senselessness of it, and the emptiness of it, just as the interchange between Anton Chigurh and Carla Jean Moss was. But NCFOM and Fargo both end with a statement of hope, NCFOM with Ed Tom Bell talking about his father building a fire in the darkness, Fargo with the Gundersons anticipating the two more months before their child is born. The Coens, in those two films, have the same message: the endings may come at any time, for no reason at all. But we can hope nonetheless, and enjoy the time we have, and do our best to build something with meaning, to defy the meaninglessness.
smally: You talking about my post? If so, sorry. I was seeing lots of what I’d consider to be spoilers after the fold and in the comments on Amanda’s review posts, so I assumed that little out of context detail was OK.
Loneoak, it’s my way of pointing to the theme of the impossibility of narrative to really do more than glance at truth, but certainly not to reveal it. Probably because there is no such thing as fundamental truth. The two dreams at the end of No Country is about this, but so weirdly is the end of Raising Arizona, where he has a dream that they have the big family they always wanted and this, the audience is instructed to believe, is as true as the story you were just told about the destruction of their marriage. It’s literally the same ending. Two stories, two dreams, which one is the “truth”?
But in No Country, Tommy Lee Jones accepts that the cacophony of stories shows that no one has access to the real truth, some great meaning. It makes him weary, but his wife says tell me anyway. Stories may never reveal the great thing we seek, making them bullshit. But somehow, they are important anyway.
Oh, I couldn’t disagree more. The ending of Raising Arizona was absolutely heartwarming—one of the few in any movie that left me with a lump in my throat—while No Country had one of the most unsatisfying endings I’ve ever seen. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the movie just stops dead, leaving everything unresolved.I realize that it’s a Coen brothers movie, ambiguity is artistic, yada yada. But I couldn’t help feel cheated that the movie was set up as a crime caper, then just left hanging. And I could have done with way less of Tommy Lee Jones’s monologues about the meaning of life. If that makes me middlebrow (or worse), so be it.
Amanda, for what it’s worth, your response in #39 seems to be directed to Josh in #36, not my comment in #35.
Jeff Fecke, I had the same reaction to NCFOM, in one sense it can even be seen as a sequel to Fargo; Fargo ends with the inscrutible killer in the back of a squad car, and NCFOM begins that way. That particular character type appears in a great many of the Coen Brother’s movies.
And I could have done with way less of Tommy Lee Jones’s monologues about the meaning of life. If that makes me middlebrow (or worse), so be it.
Well, personally, I think that his soliloquys center the message around life and its relation to fate, which, in turn, is demonstrated to be merely based on chance, in the form of Chigurh.
Plus, what Jeff said.
I liked a lot of the smaller touches in TWBB- like the fact that even passed out on the floor in his mansion, Plainview is evidently wearing the same boots he wore in the field. Being rich doesn’t make him happy- only control, expansion, and the destruction of his enemies does.
I still don’t really have a good bead on why he killed Sunday. I mean, shit, yeah, it was obvious through the whole movie he didn’t like him, but he could have fucked him over just as well by telling him to go away and not giving him a nickel.
Or the time he kicks sunday’s ass and gives him that weirdass “baptism” in a river of drill sludge.
Oh. Yeah, and let’s not forget all the totally brutal industrial accidents.
“Being capitalism distilled isn’t something that you render subtly, so his scenery-chewing actually works pretty damn well.”
Amanda, are you a fan of the Wire? I’m interested in what you think about the character of Marlo, who — many writers have argued — is capitalism distilled, although his performance is much much less quieter than DDL. (Then again, different mediums, characters, etc.)