Hollow

Rating: 4/10 (2 August 2008)

Daniel Day-Lewis's performance gets most of the attention here, which is just as well because the performance is the movie, whatever other characters appear being merely cyphers. Like the movie it superficially looks like art, on closer inspection it dissolves into facial and vocal mannerisms devoid of life. Long at two and a half hours, but feeling much longer, this is an arid and joyless experience - possibly the most po-faced film since the widescreen epics of the late 1950's. The film has no clear message, if as it appears to be that greed corrosive to the soul it simply doesn't work because Plainview is corroded from the start. As it goes on the film manages to get more and more ludicrous, the final scenes being hilarious in ways not envisaged by the makers. The hysterical response to this melodrama is a timely reminder of the gullibility of critics and that certain kind of viewer who (X-Files like) wants to believe that cinema is better now than ever before.