deeplyshallow // there haves be blood

there haves be blood

Over the past few weeks it has become obvious that the Oscars will, as usual, be sold as a battle of two films. It happens this way every year — Saving Private Ryan vs. Shakespeare in Love, you know what I mean. This year’s, um, film-off pits the Coen boys against that Anderson upstart, No Country for Old Men versus There Will Be Blood.

Last night Felicia and I completed our pre-Oscar education and saw Blood at the Palm. Now, I’ve long been a fan of the Coens, but they’d dropped the ball twice in one year recently — The Ladykillers? Intolerable Cruelty? such average movies — so I’d been throwing my support towards Paul Thomas Anderson’s film instead. Don’t get me wrong — Country was perfect. But in my opinion, Anderson was the most talented new filmmaker in the business; he was batting a flawless 4-for-4. Blood was bold new territory for him, demonstrating that he was not content to duplicate his previous successes. I hadn’t even seen the movie and I was pulling for him. After all, he was directing one of the most accomplished actors working today; the pairing was pure gold.

But now I’ve seen the movie.

Goooo, Coens!

The problem with Blood is not a lack of ambition. It paints a striking, believable time and place. It is technically outstanding — it looks and sounds amazing. But it doesn’t work. There are four reasons why.

The Story
There just isn’t one. The movie’s skeleton is incomplete, gaping holes and disconnected joints everywhere. Many scenes stand alone, and if viewed alone are intensely compelling. Daniel’s humiliation of the preacher is amusing and violent and even a little sorrowful. But the greatest moments are flung far from one another, with no roads between. This is probably what happens when you adapt just a few pages of a novel, then go out for ice cream and hookers and never come back to the typewriter.

The Performance
This is the movie that proves it: not even the most reclusive of talents is immune to his own hype. Daniel Day-Lewis is in carnivore mode, devouring every scene with gusto, and that’s bad enough, but what’s more unsettling is Anderson’s inability to rein his star in. Either Anderson was star-struck (entirely possible, given the fawning comments he’s made about Day-Lewis in the press), or he simply couldn’t hold the actor back. Day-Lewis overacts even when he has no lines, which I suppose could be considered a dubious achivement.

The Score
Maybe Johnny Greenwood’s a genius. He certainly knows how to hold a violin, I’m not arguing his talent. His score for the movie sounds very good. But he’s scoring the wrong movie. What this film demands is subtlety, not Lucifer’s personal string section. What Greenwood delivers is a score of such malevolence that it breaks the back of the movie, which simply isn’t strong enough to bear up beneath it.

The Hype
If I read one more review calling Day-Lewis’s performance ’sure-to-be-legendary’, I will kick every film critic’s ass.

Okay, so really there are five things wrong with this picture. Here’s the fifth:

Philip Seymour Hoffman
He ain’t in it. Anderson’s go-to actor has been in each of the director’s movies, but he isn’t anywhere to be found here. So not only does Hoffman seem to be at the top of his game lately, but he may well be Paul Thomas Anderson’s lucky penny.

Oh well. In contrast, the Coen brothers have managed to craft a hard, relentless, compelling story about the death of the West… and they managed to pull it off with Josh Brolin anchoring the film. There’s a clear winner here, folks. But none of this changes the fact that Josh Brolin is a pussy. In case you thought it might, I mean.