Plainview

Stephanie Zacharek wonders in today’s Salon whether Daniel Day-Lewis was too great to be good in There Will Be Blood — that is, by abandoning naturalism in his acting he’s not made the best choices for the movie. I’ve heard similar opinions from very smart friends of mine, both of whom in a 24-hour period called the movie “a great character sketch” but that there was no real story there.

I keep being surprised to hear it, not because it’s wrong, but because I had such a different impression. I was fascinated by the movie as a story of one power system supplanting another — industrialism for religion, material goods for mysticism — and I enjoyed the key characters being so much larger than life. All the better for the pieces to fall into place with the weight of history. Day-Lewis’ character’s name is the key — like many of the true rapacious characters in history, he commits his crimes right in plain view, but is too powerful to be stopped. Naturalism can tell big stories from a smaller, human perspective — but this movie was about depicting giants, the giants some people can become due to their wealth or their position (or what they represent). Despite the strangeness of Day-Lewis’ character in Daniel Plainview, his ruthlessness and sociopathy — he doesn’t seem, at least to me, implausible as someone who could have lived, or as representing a part of humanity. Instead he seems inevitable — especially in our age of hedge funds, plutocrats and Halliburtons, when a new wave of Daniel Plainviews are making themselves good and fat, likely drinking other people’s milkshakes, once again in plain view.