There will be hype

Rating: 3/10 (13 January 2008)

I like Upton Sinclair and I like Daniel Day Lewis (DDL) (esp. impressed with Gangs of NY), but this movie is a flop in so many ways I can't recount them all here. Generally. it suffers from a deeply flawed screenplay and what I would presume to be the misdirection of DDLs considerable talent. In roughly 2.5 hours, the movie does almost nothing to either account for or reveal in any particularly interesting way the moral bankruptcy of Plainview. Insofar as DDL's performance is concerned, it is particularly overacted at the scene of his baptism, when his overt contempt for the proceeding could not be more apparent. While we can sympathize with his plight and laugh with his sarcastic murmurings, it is simply unbelievable that such a manipulative person in desperate need of the critical lease for his pipeline wouldn't at least fake the requisite sincerity, especially as we know the Plainview character is a capable performer and has a history of doing so. The 30 minute over-dramatized coda explains nothing and adds nothing and thus the movie's conclusion is abrupt and unsatisfying. We already knew that Plainview was brutish and that Eli Sunday was a fraud. Some better explanation for the distance between D Plainview and H.W. would have been welcome, but none was offered.
A WEEK LATER: Everyone I speak with in NYC who has seen this movie agrees that it is weak and over-hyped. How is this rated the #28 best film ever made on IMDb, higher than Chinatown, Taxi Driver, M, Vertigo, The Third Man, Clockwork Orange, Raging Bull, Rashomon, etc... etc... ???? Are the voters here truly tasteless or just studio shills?
TWO WEEKS THEREAFTER: With another 1000 votes in the tally, its clear that the IMDb audience thinks this is the 16th best film ever made -- which goes to show how very little great cinema they've seen. Despite their rating, the film is no better than The Treasure of Sierra Madre where Bogart essentially gives DDL lessons in how to play the miner succumbed to greed -- a performance for which he didn't even grab a best actor nomination! (Admittedly, TWBB is perhaps more "true to life," and benefits from incredible staging (sets and rigs) but I take this to be a function of the present climate where audiences are willing to accept an overt "indictment" of capitalist speculation as opposed to the more restrictive clime of 1948 in which the subject had to be reduced to a comedy.) Interestingly, I just read on wikipedia that "(The treasure of Sierra Madre) is director Paul Thomas Anderson's favorite film. In fact, he watched it every night before bed while writing his film There Will Be Blood"