Two 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.

( Photographic proof! )