Letters to the Editor
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Stephanie missed the boat on this one
Daniel Plainview was a man with an antisocial personality disorder, or in an older vernacular, a sociopath. He viewed life as a game, a competition in which his only goal was to win-- over everyone he came in contact with. All other humans were simply pawns to be manipulated and crushed by him. He had no conscience at all. He used the child from the get go, and when that child grew up and wanted to follow in his stepfather's footsteps Daniel dropped him like a hot rock. He was the sort who would try to avoid violence to get what he wanted but whenever he identified someone who his twisted mind saw as a competitor or a weakling he couldn't resist murdering them. He became more and more isolated as time progressed. Notice that he never had a wife of girl friend.
How does one portray a character such as this if not as DDL did? I think he played the part masterfully. By the way, I thought his accent was more like Sean Connery than John Huston.
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?
"Really? Tom Hanks was playing himself and giving the same performance in "Big", "Philadelphia", "Forrest Gump" and "Saving Private Ryan"? I'm not even particularly a fan of Hanks, but that's just a silly suggestion."
"Clooney certainly has done his share of "movie-star" roles where he's just required to twinkle handsomely at the camera, but that's certainly not all he does, as anyone who has seen "Syriana" or "Good Night and Good Luck" can tell you."
i hate to be rude but i think it's pretty well understood that these are mostly gutless, mainstream actors who do very formulaic "good" movies and they're eaten up by baby boomers. not really a lot of substance or variation there and definitely nothing new. there's never a moment in any of there movies that you're unaware you watching tom hanks or george clooney...clooney lost himself a little in "O, Brother...." but that's about it....the rest is for sunday morning Times readers. not art film, just a formula based on what returns they can get with each as the star..... "I need you to get me somebody who can make the returns between $50-60 million."
next time clooney makes a "Syriana" ask yourself "Was that anything really that special, new or different?" not really at all
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Disabled Daniel and the Tiny Tim Experience
Granted, Anonymous -- but Zacharek does use the handy "Daniel is metaphorically crippled where Christie Brown was authentically (ie. bodily) crippled" comparison, and the suggestion is: both are broken, Day-Lewis, more so, but on the same terms -- wheelchair and all. So sure, maybe my comparison doesn't hold up fully in the sense that DDL is only a "Method cripple," but what does her comparison suggest about her views of what it means to be disabled? Are we still in the age of Tiny Tim, where this garbage flies as neutral and morally upright, even in a progressive forum like Salon's?
And I'm suspicious of anyone who targets the most obvious part of a given criticism -- Denzel is REALLY black! -- while refusing to engage with any of the more troubling suggestions it brings up. Say, why Zacharek uses politically loaded, prehistoric disability metaphors 3 times to explain why DDL gives a handicapped and therefore unimpressive performance.
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Zacharek Proves Me Wrong
With her previous brainless reviews, I thought Stephanie Zacharek had ascended the pinnacle of her idiocy. Now I see she has proven me wrong, suggesting there may be no limit to her simple-minded criticism. No doubt she has miles to go before she sleeps.
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He's Done It Before, Waaaay Back at the Beginning
Some here may remember his turn as the upper-class twit in "A Room With a View." He did precisely the same thing with that character that Ms. Zacharek describes him doing with Daniel Plainview.
And I must strenuously disagree with his performance as Bill the Butcher. "Gangs of New York" was a huge failure that definitively knocks Scorcese out of the pantheon of great directors. The ONLY thing in that movie that is stunningly original, powerful and indeed frightening is Day-Lewis essay of Bill. With minimal make-up, with only his performance, Day-Lewis created one of the most genuinely frightening characters in the history of cinema. As I've read all the hype about Burton's version of "Sweeney Todd", I couldn't help but smile to myself. Todd is a piker compared to Bill the Butcher, but only because of the incandescent performance of Day-Lewis.
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acting criticism spoken like ...
... actors envying Daniel Day-Lewis. Whether chewing the scenery or not, whether "invisible" in his characterization or not, the man in the film referred to as "Daniel Plainview" was riveting from frame 1, and the most unifying and compelling element of a film I consider uneven and even ultimately a little pointless, but entertaining and very well-made ... and he never once made me think of Daniel Day-Lewis the person, or any other role he's played. So, can I give him some credit for doing his job now?
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Brechtian?
155 letters and counting certainly proves that something in TWBB is twanging our psychic chords. This movie probably has provided as much entertainment in next day water cooler deconstructions as it did on the screen. I can still hear one of my colleagues: "and that bowling alley scene. What the F***!"
In college in the 70's I encountered Berthold Brecht plays in my Continental Lit classes. Curious, difficult items like the Dreigroschenoper (Three Penny Opera), The Remarkable Rise of Arturo Ui, and Mahagonny. None were realistic, character-driven, or remotely explicable in a Stanislavskian or post- Freudian manner, exactly what all these letters are complaining and/or celebrating about TWBB.
I want to second the suggestion of letter-writer Jonagf that TWBB is an allegory, more explicitly a Marxist allegory suggesting the inevitability of Capitalism's devolution into carnivorous competition. I know that sounds pompous, but Marxist art is often way pompous. Have you ever watched Alexander Nevsky?
Just for a moment, assume the story was never meant to be psychologically revealing character-centered novel, but a sociologically meaningful allegory from an extremely anti-Western, anti-Social-Darwinism, muck-raking, pre-Bolshevik, moderate-Socialist, from-the-pen-of-Upton-author-of-The-Jungle-Sinclair perspective. Several scenes in TWBB make sense to me if I apply this critique, the milk-shake scene and that my-kid-is deaf-and-traumatized-but-Jesus-I-can't-take-my-eyes-off-that-blazing-inferno-of-wealth scene.
In sum, I suggest that looking at this film as either a successful or a failed actor's set piece, it is a polemic and ought to be judged as writing, not acting. Sergei Eisenstein's films were not judged as Method acting failures but as political messages to an illiterate audience. Brecht promoted a stage aesthetic he called alienation, always reminding the audience that what they saw wasn't real, something to be swept up in, but something analytical and critical, like a political cartoon. If I'm right, DDL's decision to channel(invoke?) John Huston's rapacious character Noah Cross from Chinatown makes a lot of sense as furthering the intent of the filmmaker, and seems pretty brave in that it made him vulnerable to the kind of critique of his acting that SZ misapplies (if I'm right) to a Brechtian work.