I’d read good things–especially about the music–and heard some bad. But the fact that it’s showing at the local “art film” house and has been for weeks tipped me toward favoring it. I didn’t know it was 3 hours long (someone should tell us these things–prominently!)
All in all, I think it’s a good film. During the long opening sequence, the sounds are pick axes, winches, cacophonous music and the groans of injured workers. Undistracted by dialogue, the viewer focuses on the evident physical effort and agony required for the central character, completely alone and ignoring his broken leg to drag himself out of his mine shaft, across a rocky landscape, into the claims office with a rock that hides a vein of metal. THere is material force in every movement.
The cinematography alone captured my interest: silhouettes of miners and derricks against an enormous sky, vistas across landscapes whose homesteaders have no hope of surviving as farmers, a close-up of Danie Day Lewis’s face disappearing into the demonic blackness of night and oil.
And I totally agree with The New Yorker critic who praised the music as a force to be reckoned with on its own. The repeating leitmotifs designate various moods. A locust-humming drone echoes the main character’s obsessive inner drive to success. Somewhat more melodic strains drench panoramic views of landscapes soon to be obliterated and command equal attention with the vocals. (I don’t get at all the use of Brahms’–I think–violin concerto, which shows up suddenly mid-film and is replayed at the end.)
Both Day-Lewis (whose performance is towering, though his accent is unidentifiable) and Paul Dano as his main antagonist deliver lines with their whole bodies. The scenes of healing / exorcism have equal force with Day-Lewis’s horrifying hateful attacks on friend and competitor and, eventually, even his adopted son.
Still, the film at 3 hours is too long, and there are other issues. Newsweek’s critic Richard B. Woodward is right (and I thank him for pointing out) that American Capitalism generally has not been at odds with American religion. But I think he’s wrong about the nature of the opposition suggested by this film.
Eli (twin of Paul who sells Plainview the information that leads him to enormous wealth and enormous personal failure and loss) does not represent mainstream religion. Eli’s Church of the 3rd Revelation is as independent and as ambitious (at least in Eli’s head and heart) as Plainview. And Eli, its very flawed prophet, draws motivation from two sorts of greed: greed for prestige and power and greed for cash. He leads a cult where he practices Ernest Aingley style exorcisms, and he attacks his father for a fool because he fell for Plainview’s snow job. Eli’s religion resembles Christianity, but strays–like many small American sects–very far from orthodoxy. The baptism features no water but invokes blood–over and over. Eli uses the baptism to avenge his humiliation–and material loss–by forcing Plainview’s public admission that he has abandoned his son. The parallel scene where Eli must recant his faith differs only in the pain we (at least I) feel for the victim and the outcome, which finally determines the central theme.
Woodward says this theme is the conflict of American capitalism and American religion. Because the religion (and the preacher) cannot represent a generalized American faith per se, I believe what Eli represents is the inadequacy of the entire 19th century agrarian culture to confront what they could plainly see was a potentially enormous evil, at the same time that they were seduced and subdued–bought off–by the potentially enormous profit (as opposed to prophet?), which they were too ignorant to realize they would never be allowed to share.
Day Lewis represents his character as a force of nature. His confessional scene with poor Henry presents a naturalistic analysis of himself: he is misanthropic, he wants “no one else” to succeed, he is single-minded. He was, we feel, closest to happiness alone in his hole with an axe and his urgent ambition. From that opening sequence through the explosion and fire that cost him so dearly, we see that he cannot turn away from his path. Essentially he has no idea what he would do if he were not digging holes, finding commodities and swindling their original and ill-informed owners. He admits as much to the oil tycoons who seek to buy him out, “What would I do?” he asks them. It’s not that he has no choice, but he chooses not to defy his nature. He simply lives out the revelation that is himself.
Single-mindedness does not characterize Eli. A twin whose “other half” apparently shared Plainview’s unsullied preference for material over spirit, Eli wants both. He claims to want money for a church, but the church is clearly (as we see from his splendid imitation of a televangelist operating on an arid plain in pre-electric culture) a vehicle to propel him into fame. But there is no doubt when we see his face gazing at the flaming derrick that he understands what is coming and realizes it will be cataclysmic. Other critics see him as entirely flawed. I see Eli as mixed. Weakness and hypocrisy triumph, but he has the intelligence to know a bad thing when he sees it–and the greed to want to take advantage of it anyway.
What this film presents to us is a grim thesis: there are people (men mostly) so possessed by the possibilities of enterprise and their own potential to dominate that no matter how clearly we see the tragedy in their wake we are powerless to stop or alter it. In fact, that tragedy will suck us into its sinfulness. Even H.W. (why doesn’t he have a real name?) who seems remarkably unsullied by his intimate contact with the diabolic Plainview, goes off to Mexico to start an oil company. Married in a much more mainstream church, he and his bride are the next generation and, like us, already inured to the essential tragedy in which they will now become the stars.
