22 February 2008
Just seen it. As we came out, my first comment was that it was a bit one-dimensional. Ok.... Meaning? I’ll come back to that.
The first hour is wonderful, from the opening scene to the moment half-way through when the big derrick blows: all the hands-on mucky dangerous trade of getting stuff out from under the ground, eye-bogglingly well filmed. Scene 1: Daniel Fairview the obsessive-compulsive getting stuff out, on his own, and breaking his leg in the process. He drags himself miles over terrain so barren it makes the violins screech on the soundtrack. It’s marvellously well shot, and we believe every bit of the effort it costs both Daniel the character and Daniel the famous method actor. (Did he break his leg just to check he was doing it right?)
After that, all the business, the logistics, the encampments of workers – and, brilliantly, the full-size derrick that gets itself built in the background…. We’re there. The logistical trials are completely convincing, as are the charismatic performances put on by Fairview each time he wants to win over another pinched, overworked community – all shot in (I think) long takes in which Day-Lewis persuades the cinema audience as surely as the farm communities. And all along, of course, he’s using somebody else’s boy as a prop, pretending.... So we can see past the rhetoric to the conman beneath and we think: Bastard.
23 February
Yep, I’d happily watch the first hour again. But.... Anderson doesn’t do much else with it. He squanders the opportunity he has for developing a genuine opposition between Fairview and the equally charismatic (in at least two senses of the word) Eli Sunday; it ought to be the strongest thread in the drama, but it isn’t. In fact they’re hardly ever in a scene together once Fairview has started drilling, so there’s no spark. Sure, there are set-piece confrontations, and they are brilliantly done, in their way. But it’s fireworks, not drama, because after any one of them they don’t meet again, sometimes for years.
The scene is set for these head-to-heads when Eli asks to be allowed to bless the drilling. There’s a crowd gathered, Eli is ready – and Fairview does the blessing himself, using Eli’s best lines to put on his own show. Bastard, we think again, as Eli looks bemused. And after the drill strikes oil we get the first confrontation. Eli asks, fairly robustly (because he doesn’t yet know what a nutter he’s dealing with), for the money Fairview promised. Fairview responds by subjecting him to a ritual public beating, and dumping him in an oil slick. End of scene, end of dramatic possibilities. After that we get exactly two more scenes between them in the remaining hour, both pyrotechnical set pieces but essentially reducing their confrontations to those of competing alpha males in a nature documentary.
For the film to have any tension, Eli ought to have been a force of nature in opposition to Fairview. Instead he looks like second-best. In the alpha male competition between the actors Day-Lewis wins by dint of sheer screen-time. He’s hardly ever off-screen, and Paul Dano is hardly ever on. We do see him, as it happens, shortly after the humiliation in the oil-slick when he has a one-sided fight to establish dominance in his own family: he beats up his worn-out father. It looks exactly like the sort of thing Fairview would do and establishes that Eli is just as ruthless as the oil-man is. But, as before: end of scene, end of drama. For half an hour or more Fairview pootles along doing this and that, and it all gets a bit boring. There’s a mean trick he plays on his pretend son, now deaf, to get him away; some business with a brother who isn’t really a brother; some stuff with businessmen who try to buy him out. It passes the time, but it’s not that interesting....
Along comes the next Grand Guignol set piece. Eli has a chance to pay Fairview back, by putting him through an even more public humiliation than he suffered himself. To accompany the metaphorical abasement – Fairview has to confess his sins before God and the congregation – there’s physical abasement and no little violence to go with it. But then, nothing in the film stays off the physical level for long (I’m reminded of Fairview’s not-quite son returning from his exile to kick his not-quite father on the shins) and Fairview is left silently incandescent with rage as he pretends to submit. It’s no surprise that this clip is the one often shown on tv.
Another long gap. More stuff, including Fairview routinely shooting the man who turns out not to be his brother – what else is a man to do? – before we get the third, deciding bout. As ever, any rhetorical sparring soon becomes physical – and because this is the final confrontation (it even sounds like one of those Alien Vs Predator-type movies) it has to be to the death. Obviously.
Years have passed, and Eli is a busted flush. Fairview, even in the middle of a hangover that would kill ten ordinary men, delivers one knock-out blow after another. He forces Eli to deny his faith and proclaim his preaching to be a pretence. Then, as the preacher staggers up from the canvas (good this, innit?) Fairview follows up with a worse blow: the oilfield is exhausted, so his promised financial rescue of Eli’s church was just a joke. Down goes Eli again – and now it’s time for the fight to become literal. Obviously.
They’re in Fairview’s private bowling alley – as weirdly hermit-like as Leonardo di Caprio’s mansion in The Aviator – and at first we get cartoon violence, straight out of Tom and Jerry’s Bowling Alley Cat from the 1940s. Poor Eli gets a bowling ball tripping him up, gets bowling pins lobbed at him (in one comic sequence he disappears behind a screen and we see Fairview chucking the pins down at him).... And finally Fairview catches up with him. Careful with that bowling pin, Danny boy... oops, too late, and he’s delivering the inevitable coup de grace: three blows to the head. Thankfully, like the almost identical scene at the end of Reservoir Dogs (although far less resonant with regret) we see only the assailant, not the victim. But the angle widens and, well, we always know with Fairview that there will be blood. Ho ho.
It’s not climactic. There could have been a sense of catharsis if Anderson had made more of Fairview’s asceticism and all-round withdrawal from society. There are hints of his self-denial (verging, as it were, on the asexual) throughout the film: he sits out while his so-called brother gets a welcome shag in a brothel; he refuses to talk about his so-called son’s mother, or marriage in general – we never, ever, see him talking alone to a woman – because for Fairview such things don’t exist. (Interesting how even family relationships are sham, if not through his choice then through somebody else’s.) So the final murder doesn’t come as a release from this, a bursting of some kind of psychological dam, because we’ve seen such releases before. His industrial-scale boozing, his readiness to resort to violence and a whole range of bullying techniques, his sheer force of personality make us forget that his inability to make any kind of link with the human world ought to be tragic. There’s nothing orgasmic or self-revealing about the final murder: it’s the coldly stupid act of someone with no other tricks.
Any other thoughts? A couple, such as... this being an American film about men, it’s bound to be big on the idea of fathers and sons. There’s the son who isn’t a son, of course, the one person that Fairview starts to become attached to. But he can’t keep it up, because business always comes first. (It really is as crude as that in this film. Business always comes first – with Eli no less than Fairview.) We see how close he’s become when he rescues the boy from the gusher, putting himself in danger to save him. But he buggers off almost immediately, leaving the boy to the terror of his own deafness. He leaves him again later, when he tricks him into staying on the train and literally walks away.
And, because this director likes threes, the third strike means he’s out. The day before his last showdown with Eli he has a showdown with the boy, now grown up and, unlike Fairview himself, married. (Now there’s symbolic.) Unfortunately the poor lad makes the mistake of telling him he’s going into business. Unlike Eli’s father, Fairview won’t take this lying down (either literally, like him, or metaphorically). The younger man would be a competitor – Fairview rolls the word around his mouth like a pebble – and, in the strange moral universe he once tried to describe to the brother who wasn’t his brother, this makes him a mortal enemy. He savagely disowns him. Of course he does.
This is the third nail in a different coffin: Fairview’s betrayal of fatherhood. The second was to do with his own father: when he finds out that he’s recently died… he doesn’t react at all. The first was when he set Eli against his own father by cheating him – which leads to Eli’s own corruption: just like Fairview, Eli lets money dictate his behaviour. (If the final scene is anybody’s tragedy, it should be his. But it’s lost in the noise of Fairview’s meltdown.)
Other family relationships in this film, and there aren’t many, are left largely unexplored. We know what happens to the false brother: Fairview kills him even though he’s grown to rather like him. He had a real brother but he died, apparently. So it goes. Eli has a twin brother, but that just leads to confusion. It would make sense for the ‘twin’ we meet early to turn out to be Eli simply pretending, in order to distance himself from the apparent greed of his demands. (This is what I’d assumed: it would be further confirmation of his feet of clay.) But they are two people, and Fairview’s promises have split them apart. Fair enough.
And… that’s it for family. Any non-family relationships? Nope. The one person who could be a friend, Fletcher – played by Ciaran Hinds – has absolutely nothing to say in this film. We’re so busy with the bizarre world of Fairview’s fixation that there simply isn’t enough time for anything else. In fact, any interesting bits after the first blowing of the oil-well take up a tiny proportion of screen time, maybe 20 minutes out of one and a half hours. They’re little offshoots from the single, one-dimensional trajectory of the film: Fairview’s monomania which, once we’ve seen it, carries on more or less without any further development. The murder at the end is the thud of the firework rocket into the ground.
