Painfully pretentious: a director out of control of his material

Rating: 3/10 (6 July 2008)

A few months back, I was reading all these reviews of TWBB and I was thinking: Wow, this movie really divides the (commenting) public. Upon reading the comments I was thinking that I tended to believe the more critical comments more than the highly positive gushing (excuse the pun) that appeared on this board. I was enjoying following the controversy but was thinking that spending $10 to see the movie was maybe a waste of money.
Finally, I decided to rent the movie through Comcast's On-Demand and contribute my voice to the debate. I was further reassured that I wouldn't be wasting my money because the 8.4 rating it received from IMDb reviewers indicates that the positives outweigh the negatives by maybe 6 to 1.
Well, IMDb reviewers, at least those for TWBB, are a lot more gullible, superficial bunch than I thought. This movie is a wretched mess...Paul Thomas Anderson has lost a lot of my respect with this effort. Where to begin... First I'll start with the positive: Pluses: Daniel Day Lewis was good but a little bit of a self-caricature as Plainview. He was believable but also too much like a version of Bill the Butcher. Another plus was the cinematography, in particular the shots of the landscape and also some of the interior shooting and the mining scenes were well done. It was a pretty picture despite the subject matter. I gave it 3 out of 10 stars because of these positives.
Minuses: The biggest minus is that the film seems to graze over its subject matter in a superficial way: Anderson seems not to fully grasp and understand the nuances of the history and human interactions which he is filming. The characters just sort of appear there as if they are figments of his imagination which he then tries to, puppet=like, make dramatic interactions between without a deep context or narrative momentum which actually compels the characters to act in the way they do. It is though the characters are arbitrarily deciding to "make drama" for our consumption. All this despite the sumptuous scenery and the jabs at historical accuracy that seem in parts quite plausible.
If Anderson is trying to make it a "Brechtian" drama with alienation effects and all, the embarrassment deepens because of the lack of a real social message in the film. There is not really a conflict of ideas in this movie...people on this board are reading into it their own ideas, but they just aren't there in the film. What for instance does Plainview represent? Is it unbridled greed? Why doesn't Standard Oil represent that? Plainview represents a psychotic version of greed (in the end) but what is universal about that? Not all capitalists or oil men are paranoid and have anti-social personalities.
Similarly, the Paul Dano character is equally non-universal and just odd. He seems to have little deep religious conviction but simply spouts the words. Yet we don't have a sense at all why he has latched onto religion to further a personal agenda of greed? power? lust? It's just there and not given any context. On the other hand, the content and type of religion he is espousing bears a very tenuous relationship to anything I recognize as the main conflicts in American Christianity. His boyishness has no meaning in the context of any bigger ideas, nor his own power hunger. So, this character just doesn't say much beyond it being a very confused collaboration between a director, a screenwriter and an actor. Furthermore his acting is just excruciatingly bad. It was quite awful.
A further sign of Anderson's lack of control of his material is the way the music added almost nothing to the movie. It was like "What's up Tigerlily"...a music track was grafted onto the film almost randomly. The music inspired tension at odd times...I could sit you down and explain how almost invariably the music, while not unlistenable at times, was out of synch with what was happening on screen or created a false manipulation that ruined a potentially more subtle moment.
The most interesting thing, then, about this movie are 1) that Paul Thomas Anderson could make such a mess and not have anybody in his team or studio tell him that he was full of crap and 2) that so many IMDb readers/commenters are taken in by the TWBB package enough to project onto it their own thinking about this subject. My take on it is that people see the beautiful package and also the subject matter and how it MIGHT have been handled and write their own little script to it.
Should Anderson be credited with inspiring all this enthusiasm and creative interpretation? I don't think so. I believe if he listens only to this adulation that his next movie will really fall apart in a way that even these folk will no longer be able to overlook the flaws. As is, I'm hoping TWBB gets pulled down from its perch at #73 on IMDb's list to a less elevated position as more people discover what a substandard piece it is.