I simply couldn't disagree more with S. Zacharek's review. Perhaps at the basis of our disagreement is the belief - Z's - that we must be able to suss out/understand/empathize with the motives of the character, in order to call the performance 'art'.

Most of the great harm that I have observed -whether done to me or to others - is done by persons whose motives remain utterly inscrutable to me, and others. Life is about finding meaning, even and especially when meaning does not present itself in a package where neat little deductive or inductive leaps suggest themselves.

I had no objection to Plainview's stylized locutions. I accept it as part of the times. Plainview was an entrepreneur during a cutthroat time, when enormous fortunes were to be made - or lost - by things as ephemeral as the right phraseology to the right crowd at the right time.

I find it extremely telling that Zacharek's review takes absolutely no stock of the historical time in which the movie takes place. Periods of time like the land rush of Oklahoma, the gold rush, and the oil rush - they do not just take place in an arbitrary goegraphical landscape, they DEFINE the landscape of not just the movie, but the character of Plainview himself. We are not observing something as easy as greed, but something much more complex than that - the competitiveness that usually fuels greed, and its source. Plainview was a sort of selective misanthrope. Who knows why? It's not up to DDL to give us clues in his performance to figure it out - if that is, indeed, a job the movies are required to fulfill, well, it's up to the director and writer, in that order.

But we rarely if ever have this luxury in 'real life' - to come to some neatly logicked conclusion of WHY the character is the way he is - so why should we expect it of movies? It is no doubt gratifying to feel, at the end of the movie ' ah yes, I know why he did that, and she did that, and why I feel sad/happy at the end'. But it's not a necessity, or shouldn't be, for enjoyment of a movie, or to recognize something as bigger or greater or more complext than one's own ability to abosorb, understand and create meaning all in the moment.

It is the great fallacy of humans to think that there is some discoverable 'truth' behind actions and words. It may be that, occasionally, we can actually suss out a credible reason 'why' someone is the way they are, or has done what they have done. This is still illusory - it's not knowledge, just comfort with the understood facts. Mostly, we have not idea, and are left to flounder in the morass of our reactions, to try to separate the meaning of our reactions from the meaning of the actor's actions - not, by the way, the same thing.

It was also puzzling to me that Zacahrek did not mention Plainview's reaction to religious hypocrisy. I thought that these scenes were defining moments in understanding the character from both an intellectual and emotional point of view. He abhorred superstition, and emotional dependence - this was either the basis or result of his misanthropy, who can ever resolve that chicken-and-egg debate. Like many entrepreneurs, he was disdainful of those with the same objective opportunities who did not take advantage of them. It is a fact that opportunists are labeled thus by those who had the same opportunities but did not know how to seize them. It took a lot of intelligence and effort and risk-taking (and energy and steely determination) to be a discoverer on the cusp of the discovery - that was what the lengthy opening sequence was ABOUT. It seems that, somehow, incredibly, Zacharek missed what this scene established about the character and his motives.

I don't see how a complete review of the acting of this role can rule out the opening scene, nor any scene with the evangelical minister, and call itself complete in the study of the character study. To me, those scenes were pivotal in establishing who Plainview was, and giving the audience a handle on the likely meaning the actor/character had for Plainview's actions.

I thought it was a great movie, a great performance, and far superior (though quite different) than "The Age of Innocence" which I liked but found predictable, given the character's complete transparency to the audience but not himself.

I disliked Gangs of New York - the sin of DDL was the sin of every actor in the movie, and thus, I suspect, the sin of the director first and foremost - to stylize a period and people of America that few moviegoers have any real information/opinion about, so that all the performances could be anchored in that style and thus create a movie whose purpose was to be a closed ecosystem of entertainment - brining no light to bear on a period of history or its denizens, but simply to create one-dimensional characters in a one-dimensional space for visual and auditory distraction on a grand scale.

In that sense, DDL simply delivered a performance that fit the director's idea of how that character was pivotal to creating the central dramatic conflict and resolution. DDL did a creative job but it couldn't surpass the fact the movie had no dimension other than a visual one - and a banal one at that. 'GONY" was instantly forgettable - I can't recall the name of a single character in it, or the plot. But I won't be forgetting "There Will Be Blood" nor the character of Plainview for a long long time.