There will be second-guessing

Finally catching up on all the movies I meant to see in 2007, I just finished back-to-back viewings of There Will Be Blood and Into the Wild. One movie is about a completely self-absorbed man whose solipsism and hubris take priority over everything else. The other ... well, ditto.

I suppose Into the Wild was the more entertaining of the two, since the peripheral characters were more artfully drawn and recognizable. It's also beautifully photographed. I do think Sean Penn was easier on Christopher McCandless, the kid who starves to death in the Alaskan wilderness, than John Krakauer was in the book. In the film, McCandless takes on an almost Christ-like aura as he wanders the West, bringing vague epiphanies to all who cross his path. Sort of like "Route 66" without the Vette or Martin Milner. In the book, which I admired, he was a far more complex and troubled figure. Also kind of a petulant one, bent on punishing his parents for the crime causing him certain discomforts as a kid.

Krakauer made the story compelling without romanticizing McCandless, and this is the only complaint I have with the film. Sean Penn clearly sees his protagonist as heroic when there is ample evidence that he was simply breathtakingly foolish, as young men are wont to be. Burning your money in the desert may seem like the ultimate defiance against a soulless society, but it's also telling that we know he burned the money, even though no one was around to see it. This was a grandiose gesture young Chris wanted people to find out about. A bit more dramatic than, say, giving it to a soup kitchen. And a bit less convincing because of the ensuing publicity.

That said, it's a movie I'd see again. I just wish it hadn't left me with the feeling that I was being preached to by a callow kid with stars in his eyes.

There Will Be Blood is a very watchable movie, but it's also a very strange one. Daniel Day-Lewis creates a character not a lot different from Butcher Bill in Gangs of New York -- a greedy, sadistic jerk, but one who speaks with the measured, theatrical cadence of John Huston. You wouldn't call Daniel Plainview a complex character, but his cruelties are defined all the more sharply by the rare little kindnesses he bestows. He's just very interesting to watch. I wasn't surprised to learn that Paul Thomas Anderson wrote the original screenplay with Daniel Day-Lewis in mind. It's hard to imagine anybody else in the role.

I suppose There Will Be Blood owes something to Citizen Kane, with its theme of a man who grasps for the world and reaps only ruin, but there's no Rosebud here. There's nothing to redeem Daniel Plainview, and precious little to explain him. His final line -- "I'm finished" -- has a gamut of meanings, none of which are particularly edifying. I think they love that kind of thing Park City. (And if somebody gets beaten to death with a bowling pin -- well, it's just gravy.)

So many of these critically acclaimed movies send you out of theater (or in this case, my family room) scratching your head and wondering what it all meant. Yes, men and almost-men are occasionally driven by demons or angels, and that alone can be enough for a story. It is with these two films. Both, though, fall short of being the masterpieces they were supposed to be. Dave Bob says check them out anyway.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sleuths are only as good as their sidekicks

Image
I recently read the much-lauded Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands , by French author Fred Vargas, and like many others found it quirky and engaging. Her deft writing left me happy to have found another series character to follow: Commissaire Adamsberg. But that's not what this post is about. I've decided that others do a lot better job with reviews than I do, and I hate laboring over my shallow insights only to find later that I've echoed what everybody else said a long time before. (And yes, I can hear you saying: "But that's never stopped you before." True enough. Nor will it now.) So, short version: Wash This Blood is a good book. Buy it. But for all the talk about it being "eccentric" or even "kooky," it does share one key device with nearly all other detective fiction: the sidekick. Adamsberg's reliance on gut instinct and intuition is sharply defined by the hard-nosed, scientific approach of his second in command, Capitaine ...
Read more

A farewell to copy

Image
On Friday I walked out of a newspaper building as an employee for the last time. During the stroll to the far end of the parking lot, I did a brief review of my career. Here's the high point: I've worked at newspapers that have won Pulitzer prizes. And the low point: None of those Pulitzers were won while I was working at the newspapers in question. Hey, I'm sure that's just bad timing. Of the half dozen papers I worked for, the best was the Philadelphia Inquirer. The worst was the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont. When you enter the cavernous newsroom of the Inquirer, you pass by a wall festooned with pictures of reporters and editors who have won Pulitzers. It is a measure of my love of journalism that when I looked at these pictures, I usually reflected not on the prize-winning stories they reported, but on the clothes they were wearing. Look at them: All these gifted journalists, photographed at the very apex of their careers, and most of them are dressed like t...
Read more

Wall Street and Willa Cather

Image
I've been reading My Antonia , Willa Cather's 1918 novel about growing up on the Nebraska prairie. It's a beautiful book, poignant and uplifting, full of characters who reflect the truth of life in all its joy and pain. It's also an instructive portrait of the time in America when explicit toil was required for mere survival, never mind success. I've been reading it against the background noise of Wall Street's collapse, men and women on CNN droning gravely about the consequences of greed, and the need to ensure that the greediest of all do not, in the end, go broke. It's a complex issue. It takes someone like Yale business student David Bledin, writing an op-ed for the Washington Post, to put a human face on the unfolding tragedy. You think you have it tough; think what it's like for Masters of the Universe-in-training who now rue the rigors involved in chasing a seven-figure salary: "... once I could afford to splurge on a Zagat-rated "$$$...
Read more