Black and cold at heart

Rating: 6/10 (16 January 2009)

There are so many reviews here, it's unlikely this will get read. So I'll just talk about a few things about this film that I find interesting.
Great as Daniel Day Lewis' performance in this dark, soulless film certainly is, the criticisms come thick and fast now I've finally seen it, long after all the hype has died down.
I can't help but wonder whether, in casting Day Lewis, the director Paul Thomas Anderson didn't, just slightly, come to regret his casting choice. He created, in every sense, a bit of a monster. There's just no room for any competition at all in a film with a character  and played by an actor  of this magnitude. He fills the screen, he is its black heart, his voice drowns out others, his desires, his wiles, his greed, his determination  so much so that any other actor appears literally lacking (which is very unfair to some of them). Paul Dano's character seems ineffective, insufficiently greedy and grasping. Ciaran Hinds is wastefully thrown away in a small part for which he appears to have been cast solely for his interesting face. His face is very interesting, but his voice is still more so. If it wasn't to be used, why cast him? Why didn't we get the chance to see more of what HW becomes, and (** spoiler alert **) how he defies his father? I now feel, having thought about it for a while, as though I was having another, tedious chapter in The Formation of Great America  ironically dark in tone of course, to suit our modern tastes  shoved down my throat. This chapter is noble enough to show the bad with the good. At its worst it's a dull historical lecture about greed and development cleverly disguised as art; beautiful to watch, masterfully constructed, but black and empty and as full of rhetoric as a failing politician's speeches.
I can't make it out: fashion will eventually pass and this film will surely be abandoned to time, and will no longer be acclaimed as the single best thing to come out of Hollywood sincePaul Thomas Anderson. I reserve my enthusiasms for more heartfelt, lowbrow stuff: the quality may be lower but the heart is at least still there, beating and feeling.