This movie was the last of the Best Picture nominees I got a chance to look at. I was initially hesitant to seek this one out primarily because of Day-Lewis’ performance in Gangs of New York. While I admired that performance it was completely at odds with everything I remembered from his past. It also didn’t help that he made my skin crawl and gave me a compulsive urge to wash my hands whenever I saw him. Amazing, but disturbing.

And so after dragging my feet for a while I finally decided to give it a try…

Synopsis

Directed by	Paul Thomas Anderson
Produced by	Paul Thomas Anderson Scott Rudin
Written by	Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson Novel: Upton Sinclair
Starring	Daniel Day-Lewis Paul Dano Dillon Freasier
Music by	Jonny Greenwood
Cinematography	Robert Elswit
Editing by	Dylan Tiechnor

The basic premise is quite simple. The story starts off giving us a glimpse into Day Lewis’ character’s early years first as a silver prospector and then as a successful oil man in the early 1900s. The first half of the film deals primarily with his oil prospecting and drilling efforts around a small town in California and for the most part is fairly sedate. A detailed synopsis can be found here.

The Acting

Well, it’s not going to surprise anyone if I said Daniel Day-Lewis was amazing. He always is. And again, he’s completely different from anything we’ve seen before. While he still has the bandy-legged scarecrow gait from Gangs of New York the outright sadism is replaced with a seething internal anger. Throughout the movie we see his character, Daniel Plainview, change from a oil prospecting family man to one who mistrusts and hates everyone around him. There’s an unpredictability about him that is truly frightening. And his voice has gone through a complete change since I last heard him. Think Jean Luc Picard’s accent delivered with Sean Connery’s tone and you’re only half there.

Paul Dano portrays a young local evangelical minister, Eli Sunday and provides an outlet for Plainviews anger throughout the movie. Dano’s performance is memorable, and he holds his own well against Day-Lewis, but at times seems a little overplayed. The rest of the cast is good, but not really important. This film is about Daniel Plainview and his story. Everything else is, as Plainview would have us believe, inconsequential.

In Conclusion

Apart from the acting I’ve got to mention that this is one remarkably good looking and sounding movie. The Cinematography is up there with the best of them. Almost the entire movie is shot in the desert and you can almost feel the sun on your face and feel the sand in your shoes. The color and texture and realism of the scenes is astounding. The camera also seldom shies away from holding a shot longer than most anyone else would dare. It feels more natural simply because it doesn’t make us feel like everything stops when there’s nothing interesting going on.

The sound is minimalist. You hear what you need to, and seldom anything more. The original music from the soundtrack is mostly composed by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame and while completely out of sync with the era portrayed in the film works brilliantly. The discordance and disjointedness work extremely well with the subject of Plainview’s tumble into madness.

Overall this film is a must see. It will disturb and frighten you. It’s probably a little too disturbing to win Best Picture but it deserves to be up there with a chance.