A painful, unsatisfying movie

Rating: 3/10 (16 December 2008)

I took this movie at a video store without knowing anything about it. The reason I took it was that D. D. Lewis is one of our most favorite actors. And a very good actor he is indeed, and this movie definitely shows it. However, I will definitely NOT recommend this movie to my friends, unless they have an extra two and a half hours in which they want to get utterly bored, disappointed and depressed. Why bother seeing a movie in which whenever something happens it is disturbing? One in which every scene takes forever with no particular reason. I have seen other movies about oil magnates and their greed. Anyone remembers 'The Giant'? That's the movie with Rock Hudson, Liz Taylor and James Dean, who died during its shooting. That movie describes greed and ruthlessness, but without being boring. I have learned on this board that HW was somebody else's child; that's not clear at all in the movie. The director takes his time in showing Daniel shoveling for a piece of gold in a very long scene, but we are supposed to 'understand' that the child shown in his arms wasn't his? The movie develops a character all right; my problem was that this character does not interest me at all. His development from a nice guy looking nicely after somebody else's child (as it turned out) as his own, worrying about Eli's treatment of Mary, and being overall a fairly reasonable oil digger, into a greedy heartless monster is unclear, and many other things are unclear. No wonder it took Andersen two years to raise the funding. A great movie? Perhaps. A real masterpiece? Maybe. But definitely not for me.