plainview portrayed as winner: this sucks

Rating: 7/10 (3 June 2008)

yes, it's a well made film, about serious subjects, well acted, touching the great problems of life: but like it's twin "No country for old men", it glorifies these ultrahip bad-guys, while claiming to show how wrong violence is (both claimed to be making anti-violence statements) Plainview wins: he gets everything he wanted: he gets the money and the power, he beats standard oil and gets his pipeline (and threatens it's executive representative with no repercussions); he's portrayed as a flawed man, a steely, cold, ruthless businessman, but one who loves his "son": he strokes his head lovingly continuously (even when the boy burns down the hut or strikes him); that he curses him out in the end is "forgiveable: he is just being reactionary, striking out because his boy is leaving him. Most importantly, he "beats" Eli. Eli is portrayed, not too subtly, as a homosexual philanderer ("I sank into sins I didn't think I was capable of") who squanders his church's money and is disgraced. (Plainview is also hinted at as either homosexual or asexual) Plainview gets his revenge against the only man who got one over on him: he recreates Eli's shaming Baptism, gets him to renounce everything, then bludgeons him to death. but this is portrayed as being righteous and tough and All-American. The little supporting characters who always get sacrificed to the big leading man in the "Big Movie/Academy Award-winning Violence" altars are like the poor Star Trek ensigns wearing the wrong color shirts. YOU NEVER see a leading man get his brains slowly beat in, lose his life and any dignity. Eli is a snively character, who after being emasculated and humiliated by Plainview at the site, then acts the same way to his own old father and the young girls at his home: you would never see Brad Pitt or Daniel Day Lewis or even Bruce Willis take a role that requires being made someone's bitch. This is just like Chigurh's situation. he retains all dignity, gets the real audience's (20-40 yr old males) approval, scores all the cool lines and action, but the directors put up a horseshit argument that they are somehow against violence (while profiting mightily on making it cool) sorry: good movie, but really hypocritical at the same time. That bugs me.
BUT I say this all with one BIG caveat: if it is true, as some people on this board have suggested (and I tend to agree), that the whole bowling alley scene is "imaginary", or just the elderly, abandoned alcoholic Plainview's hallucinatory dream (after his son leaves), then the murder is just a fantasy: the one thing left undone, the thing he dreamed of all these years, Then it is a cool, poignant (pathetic moment (this would be why the butler doesn't freak at all, or why Eli looks the same 20 years later and why Plainview can stuill run and whip a bowling ball, etc. Then, all of a sudden, it would be much more true to Sinclair and Fitzgerald. Then... I'm finished.