Letters to the Editor
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Jeez, lighten up. Its just a movie.
Another thing: why are people so NASTY with their comments? I'm finding it painful to read a lot of the other letters here, even the ones I agree with. Tone down the vitriol. Just because you and the reviewer disagree doesn't mean she's unqualified or evil or out to show you up.
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The film isn't set in the present day!
Plainview was an actor. That's the whole point of the movie. And he was an actor during a time when acting was only considered good if it was grandiose. What we think of as great acting today (naturalism) was unheard of in his time. None of his "audience" (the rubes he conned for their land) would have allowed him to steal right from under their noses if he'd been just like them. You've completely forgotten who Lewis is playing. OF COURSE he's exaggerated.
You saw Plainview when he was alone, and he was quiet, subdued, and obviously driven. But if he had been that way in front of the people he wanted to fool, he wouldn't have been "the oil man" they trusted so much. His entire life was spent convincing people to trust him, but people back then hadn't seen thousands of movies and scores of bad (and good) actors. If they had gone to a movie with a "naturalistic" actor, they'd have thought he was terrible and that they themselves may as well have been on screen. These people would have only been convinced by something grander than themselves, and Plainview gave them that.
Only in the presence of others (yes, including his own adopted son) does Plainview become the oil man. If the film had been set in 1950, he'd have played the dashing, worldly playboy to the hilt and would have won over the people in that way, because gone was the obvious overacting and 1950s audiences revered glamour and sophistication--the movie star who looks and acts like a movie star. If it had been set in the present-day, Plainview undoubtedly would have gone more natural in his spectacle, so that it wouldn't have been a spectacle at all, since audiences today appreciate someone with no pretenses. He behaved like a sideshow because back then, the sideshow was new to people.
You forget that devices come and go and eventually, we see them so much that they no longer impress us (soon, naturalism may be passé), and I think you've actually disproved your entire point because your claim that Lewis lacks naturalism actually supports the contextualization of Plainview in the early 1900s.
Never forget the context! It's the foundation to understanding a film (or book).
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Because
Jeez, lighten up. Its just a movie. Another thing: why are people so NASTY with their comments?
Because this woman gets paid to write this horseshit.
Stephanie Zacharek's reviews are an abomination. They have nothing to do with evaluating film as art, they have nothing to do with any kind of effort to understand the craft of acting or anything else. They have to do with trying, at all costs, to superficially come off as different, as interesting, in a world where the rest of us try to recommend movies to others based on what they might personally get out of them. You know, based on how good they are.
How different of you, Stephanie, to try to claim that Day-Lewis was too great to be good! How droll. Your existence has now been justified for a good long time.
I cannot believe anyone would employ this person as a film critic. It's stunning.
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Naturalism
Day-Lewis did not turn in a naturalistic acting performance, but his performance -- and the film as a whole -- was spot-on in interpreting literary naturalism, which is more-real-than-realism, so-real-it-hurts.
Literary naturalism is not very interested in individual human psychology. It is interested in humans as cogs in a great machine, and in the corruption that arises from that. Day-Lewis was not playing a man, he was playing an Oil Man. The Oil Man.
"Why does Plainview feel and act the way he does? We never know." Exactly. The film presents surfaces -- the observable world -- and that's all we can know. The horror comes from not being able to observe (and therefore comprehend) the machinery, the black goo, that lies beneath the surface which controls everything we see. That is the entire point!
And, the point is relevant. When we're so deep in the muck, do we really care what the personal motives of powerful people are? Does it matter what is in Putin's soul, or whether Bush really wanted democracy for Iraq or cheap oil or to get his Oedipal fix? Isn't what is in plain view for all to see enough to deal with, and more important?
Most naturalist literature is not entertaining; try reading Upton Sinclair sometime. But this film succeeded where a lot of naturalist literature doesn't. Personally, it gripped me from the opening scene to the last frame. What a ride.
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on actors acting...
I have not not seen There Will Be Blood, so my comments are not about Daniel Day-Lewis, but about the general argument expressed in the article. So, with that rider, I have to say that I agree with Stephanie's proposition.
For a long time I could not not bear to watch Meryl Streep, so distracted was I by the neon sign above her head that flashed "I AM ACTING BRILLIANTLY". The precision of her performances was too precise, too calculated. You got the feeling that if the director called for 20 takes then Streep would have been identical in each. Her representation of the character was a perfect response to the script and the story, but did not seem to truly live in each scene as it was shot.
Fortunately, I feel that she moved through that phase and I think much of her work in recent years has been the best of her career - even if some of the roles did not scream out for so much attention.
I think also to the most breathtaking and wonderful performance I've seen in ages: Hugo Weaving in Little Fish. The actor did not master the character - the character took over the actor and lived in real time in each moment as it was shot.
It's a fine line though, and a matter of taste to some degree.
So at the risk of rambling more, I'd just suggest to other letter writers that even if you disagree with Stephanie's assessment of Day-Lewis's performance in this film, at least take a moment to think about her point.