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selenakTwo days ago I watched There Will Be Blood, which is one of those movies you can't bear watching again any time soon but are glad to have watched. It gives you the sense of some monolithic lethal landscape, to be regarded in appalled awe. I've seen comparisons to Citizen Kane, but aside from the fact that both central characters spend the last ten minutes of their respective movies lonely in castles of their own, I can't see a bsis of comparison; two very different animals, those films and those characters. We see Charles Foster Kane from various perspectives, and among many other things, Citizen Kane has rapid-fire dialogue; you can tell that Herman Mankiewiciz, the scriptwriter, comes straight from the Hollywood of the screwball comedy era. Daniel Plainview, the main character of There Will Be Blood, on the other hand, is the viewpoint character of the film, there are probably just three or so scenes he's not in, and if he resembles any epic millionaire in cinema or real life, it's Howard Hughes rather than William Hearst (or Kane). It's a tour de force performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, and it needs to be, because the script takes no prisoners as Daniel Plainview gets more obsessive, crazier and more inhuman by the minute. It's Lear without Lear's reconciliation with Cordelia; a terrible, terrible old man at the end, but you can't look away. (Plainview has a Cordelia, and a Fool, too, but when his adopted son whom he does love has an accident and is deaf as a result, Plainview can't handle it and sends him away; and the man claiming to be his half-brother Henry, his Fool, affectionate in his harmlessness, whom Plainview opens up to a bit, suffers a terrible fate when Plainview feels himself betrayed.)
Plainview gets introduced in fifteen minutes of mostly silent film, and only then do we hear his voice, and you can tell Day-Lewis goes for Shakespearean, too, "I am an Oilman" rolling of his tongue as if it's "I am determined to be a villain". Speaking of silent film, his early scene with the baby that is to become his adopted son has echoes of Chaplin's The Kid which is a truly horrid irony considering how this father-son relationship will end up, and yet strangely appropriate: there is joy and sudden tenderness in both scenes, but Plainview isn't the Tramp, he's the millionaire, and the millionaire might occasionally befriend the tramp but in the end will always turn on him.
If I have a cricitism, it's that the script doesn't make clear whether two crucial characters played by the same actor are meant to be the same person using different names, or two different people; I had to look up the novel the film is vaguely based on, Upton Sinclair's Oil!, to find out they were in fact meant two be brothers. Still, it's just one flaw in the whole larger than life monstrosity which is this film, and the feeling of awe still persists, so I don't mind.
****
A postscript to my Mallorca vacation: on Tuesday, our last day, the sky was still cloudy, so we didn't make the hiking tour we had planned but went back to Deia to visit Robert Graves' house-turned-museum, which had been closed due to an electricity fallout the week before. The house, called Ca'n'Alluny or Canellun (the later name was the one Graves himself used), makes you wistful and doesn't come across as morbidly museal at all but as if he'd left it just five minutes ago.
Inside, most of the rooms are like they used to look when he was living there, and of course the most interesting is the study. Check out the hand-written pages with the crossed out lines, those are the genuine article:
There is also the one with the printing press Graves and Laura Riding used before they had to leave the country during the Civil War:
And one room is made into a museum of the various Graves-related documents. Here's the letter from the Times, who had reported Graves dead at 21 (as he had survived that particular incident, though just barely, he got to read his own obituary, his parents got the telegram from the war office, and he had to write to the Times to make it clear he was still among the living); on the left is a copy of the Graves portrait Eric Kennington drew, and on the right a photo of Siegfried Sassoon:
Letters from readers in response to Goodbye To All That. One, and a newspaper clipping, is from Germany:
Graves' was half-German, and his full name, Robert von Ranke-Graves, which is still used for the German editions of his books here, caused him no end of trouble in school in the years leading up to WWI. Speaking of Goodbye To All That, the museum in addition to having Graves' own work at hand also had the memoirs Wild Olives by his son William, of their life in Mallorca, which make for rather sad reading in the later part because Graves in old age started to lose his memory and succumbed to senility, and the inhabitants of Deia often found him wandering through the streets and escorted him back. The worst aspect of this, William writes, was that as the short term memory and the memories of the last decades went, the neurasthenia or shell shock from WWI returned full force and was the very last thing to do, so here was his father, an old man with a stick and a nurse, ducking and running from the ghosts of the Somme haunting him to the grave.
To end on a less depressing note: googling for Graves recently I found out that there was a play about his meeting and ensuing friendship with T.E. Lawrence, The Oxford Roof Climber Rebellion. (The incident the title refers to is described by Graves near the end of Goodbye To All That.) As this more detailed review describes it, it makes me wish I could have seen it, but alas, I'm not in New York.
Plainview gets introduced in fifteen minutes of mostly silent film, and only then do we hear his voice, and you can tell Day-Lewis goes for Shakespearean, too, "I am an Oilman" rolling of his tongue as if it's "I am determined to be a villain". Speaking of silent film, his early scene with the baby that is to become his adopted son has echoes of Chaplin's The Kid which is a truly horrid irony considering how this father-son relationship will end up, and yet strangely appropriate: there is joy and sudden tenderness in both scenes, but Plainview isn't the Tramp, he's the millionaire, and the millionaire might occasionally befriend the tramp but in the end will always turn on him.
If I have a cricitism, it's that the script doesn't make clear whether two crucial characters played by the same actor are meant to be the same person using different names, or two different people; I had to look up the novel the film is vaguely based on, Upton Sinclair's Oil!, to find out they were in fact meant two be brothers. Still, it's just one flaw in the whole larger than life monstrosity which is this film, and the feeling of awe still persists, so I don't mind.
****
A postscript to my Mallorca vacation: on Tuesday, our last day, the sky was still cloudy, so we didn't make the hiking tour we had planned but went back to Deia to visit Robert Graves' house-turned-museum, which had been closed due to an electricity fallout the week before. The house, called Ca'n'Alluny or Canellun (the later name was the one Graves himself used), makes you wistful and doesn't come across as morbidly museal at all but as if he'd left it just five minutes ago.
Inside, most of the rooms are like they used to look when he was living there, and of course the most interesting is the study. Check out the hand-written pages with the crossed out lines, those are the genuine article:
There is also the one with the printing press Graves and Laura Riding used before they had to leave the country during the Civil War:
And one room is made into a museum of the various Graves-related documents. Here's the letter from the Times, who had reported Graves dead at 21 (as he had survived that particular incident, though just barely, he got to read his own obituary, his parents got the telegram from the war office, and he had to write to the Times to make it clear he was still among the living); on the left is a copy of the Graves portrait Eric Kennington drew, and on the right a photo of Siegfried Sassoon:
Letters from readers in response to Goodbye To All That. One, and a newspaper clipping, is from Germany:
Graves' was half-German, and his full name, Robert von Ranke-Graves, which is still used for the German editions of his books here, caused him no end of trouble in school in the years leading up to WWI. Speaking of Goodbye To All That, the museum in addition to having Graves' own work at hand also had the memoirs Wild Olives by his son William, of their life in Mallorca, which make for rather sad reading in the later part because Graves in old age started to lose his memory and succumbed to senility, and the inhabitants of Deia often found him wandering through the streets and escorted him back. The worst aspect of this, William writes, was that as the short term memory and the memories of the last decades went, the neurasthenia or shell shock from WWI returned full force and was the very last thing to do, so here was his father, an old man with a stick and a nurse, ducking and running from the ghosts of the Somme haunting him to the grave.
To end on a less depressing note: googling for Graves recently I found out that there was a play about his meeting and ensuing friendship with T.E. Lawrence, The Oxford Roof Climber Rebellion. (The incident the title refers to is described by Graves near the end of Goodbye To All That.) As this more detailed review describes it, it makes me wish I could have seen it, but alas, I'm not in New York.
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no subject
Date: 2008-02-17 05:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-17 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-17 10:00 pm (UTC)And now I wish I could have seen the play. Why don't I have Jumper's powers?
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Date: 2008-02-18 05:40 am (UTC)