Paul Thomas Anderson's Inferno

Rating: 7/10 (10 January 2008)

The Promethean rise of a driven man in a young oil industry gives this movie moments that make it as good any movie seen in a long while. Rise and fall stories are a familiar trope in movies, especially American movies. There Will Be Blood takes a different and strange detour that is not really a fall, but a sudden sidestep into demented isolation.
Attached, and ruinous to the movie, is Paul Thomas Anderson's obvious self loathing and loathing for religion in general and Christianity in particular. His pen, used to bludgeon, hammers any joy out of a Chinatown fable about oil, in the service of what seems to be therapy for the Director's personal seventh circle of religious hell. His, a hell hectored to a captive movie audience, who are expected to be entertained by his very personal denial of faith in an otherwise interesting semi-historical story of how little oil became big oil.
What begins with a bit of religious weirdness a third of the way into the movie, becomes an ongoing relentless evisceration of all that faith or salvation represents to some people. It is all meat to the Director's abattoir of nihilistic expression of his personal loss of faith. Daniel Day Lewis, worth the price of admission to any movie, dominates every scene despite what many of the improbable scenes in There Will Be Blood require him to do. Filmed in sweating close up to excess, in shadow, or eerily in interrogation room quality bright light, he is alternately sublime and ridiculous. Allowed to be an oilman on the make, he is one of the remarkable movie characters of our time. Pulled this way and that by a tortured script that can't make up its narrative mind, with a father son subplot that makes the word 'excessive' seem inexpressive, he is left, at the end of the movie, as a drunken murderous reversed Torquemada.
The bludgeon bludgeons, no rhyme, no reason, against a religious jones that makes a crack cocaine addiction seem a taste for a third chocolate chip cookie in comparison.
In a country with declining church attendance, an increasingly secular country with the major sources of mass communication skeptical of all religious thought and practice, one wonders at the Director's angst. Maybe being named after two apostles is a heavier burden that can be imagined.
The final scenes of degradation and violence caused me to almost turn my head. Why, what for, what in the movie or in Daniel Day Lewis' character brought us to such an ending? What personal experience brought Paul Thomas Anderson to such a nihilistic world view? This movie lover sat silent at the end wondering at what he had been subjected to and for what purpose? In There Will Be Blood, there is little exposition as to character motivation, and one personality who dominates the movie from beginning to end. I wish it had bee Daniel Day Lewis' Daniel Plainview, not Paul Thomas Anderson's self-loathing.