Disappointment of a lifetime

Rating: 4/10 (23 February 2008)

Just came from the theater and I have to say that my confidence in IMDb as a useful rating source has seriously eroded. Incredibly, more than 51% of over 28,000 voters rated this movie a 10! I've been viewing movies for more than 50 years and this one is by far the biggest disappointment I've ever experienced.
This from someone, mind you, who thinks very highly of P.T. Anderson! I consider Magnolia one of the finest movies ever made (underrated at IMDb) and I'm also a big fan of Boogie Nights, many scenes of which remain indelibly in my mind after a single viewing many years ago. But nearly everything about TWBB is wrong, wrong, wrong. The only element that worked at all was Daniel Day-Lewis, who added yet another brilliant performance to his portfolio.
Where to start my critique? Well, first of all, Upton Sinclair must not only be turning over in his grave but vomiting up everything he ever ate. It's sacrilege for P.T. to claim that his screenplay is based on, or even suggested by, Sinclair's novel Oil! After reading Sinclair's work a couple of weeks ago, I can tell you that only a handful of truly superficial elements made it into the screenplay. Loved the novel, hated the movie. P.T. made no attempt whatsoever to adapt the novel. It's a travesty for the Academy to have nominated his screenplay in the "based on material previously published" category. Especially if you contrast it with Atonement--an extremely faithful and successful adaptation of Ian McEwan's outstanding novel.
SPOILERS BEGIN HERE: Sinclair's novel is an engaging diatribe against capitalism involving two major themes. First, that unregulated capitalists can amass enough money/power to purchase and subvert supposedly populist governments. He wrote Oil! in 1927, just after the Teapot Dome Scandal of the Harding administration, and much of the book is a thinly veiled roman a clef that expresses his outrage over that affair. The other major theme is the rebellion of labor against rampant capitalists, through unionism and fledgling socialist and communist movements in the USA and via actual government takeover by the Bolsheviks in Russia, which had just happened in 1917 and was still playing itself out on the world stage.
The Day-Lewis character in the book was in fact a very successful, mid-level businessman who specialized in drilling for oil (an oil operator, in other words). He was good at making sharp deals and at bribing officials at all levels of government to gain favorable treatment. He was not, however, a crazed murderer, or even a murderer at all! In fact, he tended to treat his employees better than most of his contemporaries.
His son, called Bunny, was actually his son, not an orphan (the mother was separated), who remained very close to his father throughout his life. He was never deaf. Bunny was a major character and the overall narrator of the novel. Paul was another major character. He was an extremely principled and well-read do-gooder and labor organizer whom Bunny highly admired. He was not, as P.T. would have it, someone who would sell out his family for the proverbial thirty pieces of silver ($500.)
Overall, Sinclair's novel richly characterizes a multitude of players and epicly describes the sociological forces that drive them. The movie, by comparison, is pitifully small and petty, with players depicted as inherently evil but with little motivation for being so.
I could go on and on and on about differences. In reality, the only way I can understand how such a disaster as TWBB could have come about is to imagine that P.T. was on crack when he read the novel and/or when he wrote the screenplay. He and I certainly didn't read the same work--the novel by Upton Sinclair! Of course that may not matter to most viewers. I am guessing that less than one in 500 of you might actually read, or have read, Sinclair's novel. The crushing disappointment for me is how such an incredibly talented director could have spent so much time and money to make such a miserable movie from such a great book.
Even when I try to judge the movie for itself instead of for what it could have been there are numerous things I hate about it. The music, for instance, is terrible. And I normally find most musical scores to be excellent. But in TWBB, P.T. is apparently going for some sense of tragic doom, which is highly inappropriate and ultimately annoying, particularly when devoid of any character motivation. Then there's the editing, which I found tediously long in shot after shot. The movie just drags, and for no valid reason.
And there's the science of oil drilling, which P.T. gets completely wrong, apparently on purpose, since it is perfectly described in Sinclair's novel (not to mention that he could have easily hired a technical consultant had he wished to get it right.) I'm talking about basic stuff here, not anything esoteric. Most egregious is the depiction of drilling as piledriving--lifting and dropping a bar. As the novel so clearly states, drilling is just that--drilling. It's accomplished by rotating a bit, just like you would with a hand drill, but on a larger scale. Arrgh--how do such changes make any sense?
If you don't agree with my review, I would ask that you reserve judgment until you: (1) read Sinclair's novel Oil!, (2) imagine that Clint Eastwood had spent the same amount of time and money as P.T. did to adapt it, and (3) compare your imagined Eastwood adaptation to the actual TWBB.
Oh, to think what might have been! Please, P.T., go back to your original screenplays and leave adaptations to those more willing to sublimate their egos.