Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012)

Like so many modern movie titles, Lincoln is only one word, and as with so many other titles, this offers an oversimplified, even misleading idea of what the actual film contains. Though Steven Spielberg roped in perhaps the most noteworthy white elephant actor of our time, Daniel Day-Lewis, to portray the 16th president, Lincoln concerns the man only elliptically. He appears chiefly as a do-gooder who relies on Machiavellian practices, one of which is the use of others to do his dirty work. And though the film concentrates on the passage of the 13th Amendment, Lincoln’s most celebrated achievement and undoubtedly an act of great good, Lincoln reveals that the path to that moment was rough and dirty, indeed.

That filth can be seen in the film’s first shots, the only ones of the movie to take place on a battlefield, or at least the only one to do so during a battle rather than the still aftermath. In a few gruesomely intimate but stably mounted shots, Spielberg manages to top the false realism of Saving Private Ryan for sheer visceral repulsion. Unionists and Rebs have moved too close for musket fire, resorting to bayonet stabs, fistfights, even drowning foes in the rising rainwaters in trenches. It is brute savagery at its most chaotic and meaningless, and it hangs over the rest of the film as Lincoln alternately uses and is hindered by war developments in his quest to get slavery abolished. And as the footage is revealed to be the memories of black soldiers relating the battle to Lincoln, the pride they express in getting back at Confederates massacring all captured black soldiers hints at the tangle of racial strife that will only be compounded by the amendment, not solved by it.

Gangs of New York

Gangs of New York is the epic, self-destructive companion piece to Who Shot Liberty Valance. It posits that one need not have traveled out west to find romantic lawlessness, and that one could not find the answers to a more productive society back east. It is also proof that Martin Scorsese can make masterful work no matter the circumstances. Gangs of New York is his most artistically compromised picture, trimmed down even at its 167-minute length from a reported five-hour cut and commercialized in a futile attempt to make the film into some sort of hit. Yet it remains his most personal, above perhaps his erstwhile passion project, The Last Temptation of Christ, the ultimate paean to Marty's beloved hometown and an exorcism of his hangups.

The impositions placed upon the film by Miramax hindered this vision, yet perhaps they fueled the more bombastic visual choices that serve Scorsese's deconstruction of his career. Besides, the marketing of the film provides for a misdirection Scorsese attempts with the film itself, goading the audience into identifying Amsterdam, the underdog character who enjoys a romance and narrates the picture, played by an actor still known for being a teenage heartthrob (Leonardo DiCaprio), as the protagonist. He is not.

The real crux of the story, and the personification of the choices made by the film's director, is William Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis). He symbolizes the dying New York, at once Liberty Valance and Tom Doniphon. He's a bigot and a ruthless killer, but he has a sense of honor. So do many villains, of course, but Gangs of New York is about the transition in New York's history, not from anomie into civilization but the loss of the "nobility" of violence. Bill is not the symbol standing in the way of progress; he is the last of a dying breed.

Day-Lewis' performance here has been eclipsed by his work in There Will Be Blood, and Daniel Plainview is indeed a testament to the actor's ability to captivate an audience even with a character diametrically opposed to identification or empathy. Yet William Cutting has an emotional complexity that runs deeper even than Day-Lewis' earlier Christy Brown. When he kills the father of DiCaprio's character, Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), in a street battle at the start, Cutting refuses to allow any of his gang, the Natives, to spoil the body. "He'll cross over whole," Bill declares, despite his vicious hatred of the Irish Catholicism Vallon represents. For Bill, why he's fighting someone is less important than how those enemies conduct themselves. In a quietly piercing scene, Bill confides in the adult Amsterdam, whom Bill accepts without learning his true identity. Draped in an American flag, Bill condenses his power, the power of anyone who holds it, into fear and the ability to manipulate it. He tells the boy about Vallon, what a great man he was; in one skirmish, Amsterdam's father got the best of ol' Bill and nearly killed him, sparing his foe's life only to force him to live with the shame. Bill notes that he cut out one of his own eyes because he could not look at Vallon.

Like the film, Bill is visually outlandish, absurd even. He routinely sports a red coat as if in a Nicholas Ray period piece, complete with pants that manage to be even longer than Day-Lewis' lanky frame can allow. It's the sort of get-up that sticks out even in a period picture: here is a man who doesn't need to care what others think. It's funny, then, that Bill should reflect Scorsese's aesthetic, given the issues he suffered, even as a universally acknowledge master, at Miramax's hand.

Scorsese's direction is without question the loosest in his oeuvre, or at the very least since Mean Streets threw the director far ahead of the minor accomplishments of his first two features. The opening gang fight, set to anachronistic music and even edited as if a submission to MTV, sets the tone for the film's structure as it draws a line in the sand separating those willing to play along in Marty's meticulously recreated sandbox from those expecting a more conventional movie. Yet Scorsese's direction tests the patience even of the loyal: scenes jut about as if someone unleashed a wild chimp into Thelma Schoonmaker's editing suite and the director simply trusted that his longtime collaborator knew what she was doing when he got the results back. Sudden transitions, awkward breaks, unnecessary cutaways in the middle of an action for a reaction shot or something else to break the scene: all of these issues exist in the film, the result of both the trimming and whatever held Scorsese and Schoonmaker's fancy.

Yet this seeming clumsiness allows the director to break entirely from the tropes that bind the genre. Scorsese worked within them for his superb The Age of Innocence but gave the characters an emotional resonance so many of these pictures chase but never obtain. Gangs, however, belongs firmly with his gangster pictures. Indeed, he casts all of the characters, be they actual gang members, policemen, whores or politicians, as gangsters. The women seduce and take from the men, who take from others to cover their losses, before giving their cut to corrupt coppers and bosses like Bill, who use the money to pocket politicians. It's far too tangled a web to be called a "vicious cycle."

Scorsese films these characters with the same passion he afforded to his earlier films, the ones that mixed character with aesthetic to make everything more visceral, more felt. He lost himself in the jumble of The Departed, but here Marty manages to convey the states of mind of both lead characters. He charts both Amsterdam's rash bravery and the loathing he feels for himself and his self-doubt as well as Bill's sadness at the "rising of the tide" that will wash away everything Bill values. The two characters (and moods) play off each other, Bill's nobility and paternal treatment of Amsterdam compounds the boy's feelings of guilt for not avenging his father, and when Amsterdam finally does make his move, in a craven attempt to get the jump on the Butcher, Bill's feelings toward the changing world are confirmed: Amsterdam is not an evil man, and certainly not a villain in the same way that Bill isn't, but he represents the shift of gangsterism from something done out in the open with a set of rules to a world governed by backstabbing, literal and figurative.

Because Scorsese somehow taps into two mindsets at once through his disjointed style, everything is magnified. The sets, painstakingly crafted in Rome, are massive and establishing -- it's a telling contrast of convictions that George Lucas, upon visiting his old friend during production, remarked, "Sets like that can be done with computers now." Like the sets, the jargon is so accurate that even the characters seem to have no idea what the idioms mean and need many translated. The story is Shakespearean, and Monk McGinn (Brendan Gleeson), a big Irish mercenary who once fought for Vallon, even says so when he sees Amsterdam save Bill from assassination. Later, Amsterdam kills the crooked cop Jack (John C. Reilly, the best of the supporting cast) in a scene that recalls Hamlet stabbing Polonius through the arras. Too, the curtain that Jack yanks down in his death throes reveals a comically outsized cross, at once a reminder of the guilt that drives Amsterdam to avenge his father and Scorsese's pointed jab at himself for redirecting the Catholicism in his films squarely on the guilt that he's still exploring in this film.

The film's amplified visuals reach their apex with the climax, a thunderous vision of the Draft Riots that grows so huge that even an elephant roams the street at one point. Gangs of New York, which halted post-production for a time in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, is about not fighting wars that are not yours to fight. Amsterdam spins his wheels for most of the film because his subconscious recognizes that Bill's conflict with the Vallons ended with his father's death, yet he presses on because he feels the need for vengeance. Many of the Irish immigrants who arrive in America are the first to be conscripted in the new draft, and Scorsese overlaps a scene of a batch of soldiers being shipped off on one of the same boats that brings home a hold full of coffins with every docking with an Irish ballad that mourns the state of the immigrants, forced to flee starvation only to find themselves forced into someone else's war. Ironically, the one war worth fighting, the war to preserve the union, is met with indifference, then aggression from the New Yorkers who see themselves as their own entity. Thus, the greatest city in the Union is reduced to what might look no different than a bombed Confederate city, to be rebuilt as a part of the Union through the same backhanded procedures that returned the South to the fold. Scorsese isn't asking us to keep quiet and accept violence against us, but he also asks that we stop and think before fighting, and as such Gangs of New York becomes not only a companion to John Ford but Bruce Springsteen, specifically his own post-9/11 triumph, The Rising.

In the slaughter and smoky haze of the riots, Amsterdam and Bill settle their score. This is the last chance Bill will have to die "a true American," and he takes it, killed honorably by Amsterdam rather than face the world he sees on the horizon, even through the massive cloud kicked up by the shelling. Note that, at the end of the film, Bill, not Amsterdam, rests in the grave next to Vallon's, and as Scorsese suddenly jumps through history to the present (well, just before it, as he leaves the World Trade Center intact), we see time forgetting the men who helped shape the city, and the fact that the movie is about those who created and not destroyed is why the Towers remain. "The appearance of the law must be upheld," Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent) told Bill early in the film, "especially when it's being broken." That dishonesty stuck in Bill's craw, and he later tells Tweed, "You can build your filthy world without me." Thus, he wouldn't feel so bad about being covered up by the vines, forgotten by the world he laid the foundation for -- as the tagline reminds us, "America was born in the streets -- and we shouldn't pity him either, not simply because of his violent acts but because obscurity is far nobler than cheap veneration.

Nine

No genre better reflects the status of Hollywood itself as the musical: in the prosperous postwar years, musicals were triumphant, joyous and effervescent; in the '70s -- with New York, New York and, to an extent, Nashville -- they reflected the cynicism and the genre revisionism of New Hollywood; Dancer in the Dark, admittedly not a Hollywood picture (not to mention morally repugnant), nevertheless demonstrated the bold experimentation of the '99-'00 mini-era. Now, they're vacuous and desperate, pumped full of star power and a fine coat of glitter to make a quick buck the first weekend before all attention immediately dissipates.

Rob Marshall proves this once with Nine, based on Arthur Kopit's book for Maury Yeston's stage musical based on Federico Fellini's 1963 masterpiece 8½, possibly one of the ten greatest films ever made. In theory, Rob Marshall's adaptation of the musical might have been perfectly fitting for Fellini: 8½ is inexorably tied to the cinema, and live theater informs Nine. The act of returning it to the silver screen might have resulted in such an overflow of meta that Fellini might have risen from the grave. But Marshall's adaptation is limp and flaccid, which may be the point given its protagonist's artistic -- and, as more and more of the women around him express disappointment, potentially sexual -- impotence, though such an interpretation would require me to make excuses for a film that doesn't have any.

Daniel Day-Lewis, who once apprenticed under an Italian shoemaker, plays Guido, still a Fellini stand-in after his transplant to the stage and back again. He's a director of renown, beloved by seemingly all of Italy, albeit only for his "early films, not the flops." I'd somehow hoped against hope that Inglourious Basterds might have put the kibosh on English actors speaking English with accents to portray foreign characters, but Nine is a buffet of excruciatingly bad approximations of Italian (well, except for Judi Dench as Guido's costume designer/confidante Lilli La Fleur, who simply speaks in her British accent as if it is close enough to French). Day-Lewis, the man who so dedicated himself to his craft that he remained in a wheelchair at all times during the filming of My Left Foot, puts forth no effort beyond adopting a basic Italian accent and smoking a great deal.

It might not have been the end of the world, though: 8½ was Fellini's way of excoriating his demons, creative and sexual, allowing him to play out his fantasies, hangups and writer's block through Guido. Nine, conversely, is about the women who inform those fantasies, from Guido's mother (he is a Catholic, after all) to his wife to his mistress to a reporter to...Jesus how does this guy even have the imagination to spare for art? Unfortunately, Nine is based on the same reductive types that Fellini used back in '63 that were already dated but at least a part of his attempt to reconcile and overcome his lusts; Guido often stands by silhouetted in the showtunes as the women sing of their disappointment with the director, trapping the women in some nebulous nether-zone that confines them to Guido's perception of them and their drive to be independent creatures commenting upon Guido's failures.

Thus, the cast, packed with Oscar-winners looking to prove they can sing and dance, has nothing to do: Day-Lewis serves only to move the plot in the libretto, taking him from female to female to set off each musical number before simply moving on without taking stock of the ideas and comments brought up in the songs. Nicole Kidman, playing Guido's muse, appears in only one scene after the breathless reverence of admirers build a legend around her, and her graceless movements tear down that vague mythos just as you're starting to believe it; her awkward movements make for an uncomfortably hilarious moment when Guido and the producers watch screen tests and fawn over her beauty later. More distressing is Kate Hudson, once again doing her best to chip away at that pedestal I placed her on after Almost Famous; she plays an American Italophile who idolizes Guido's films for bringing the Italian fashion to the world but, as with the film itself, has no clue what that fashion really is. The notes I take in the theater are by necessity brief and jumbled, what with the challenge of jotting down notes while other events are happening (not to mention it's quite dark in there, you know), and occasionally one amuses me enough to share without expanding upon it. My chief note for Hudson reads: "Too much makeup. Too much scary." Marion Cotillard, who has the most convincing accent as she's French and plays a French-Italian, has the only role of any substance as Guido's wife, once a rising actress who ceased working when she married -- a priest calls her a "good Catholic wife," the closest the film comes to exploring the Catholic foundation of Fellini's original. She has the only interesting line in the entire film when the same priest giddily exclaims "You're Luisa del Forno!" and she fatalistically responds, "I was."

The actors might not be at fault here, as Nine is, judging from the songs and storyline presented to us, a mediocre musical. Yes, it won Tonys in its original run and its revival, but there isn't a single good song. Its first tune doesn't even have words, caught between an instrumental overture and the endless "la-la-la" chanting of the sea of women Guido imagines. An entire song is dedicated to the Folies Bergère (featuring Dench singing suddenly, hysterically in a French accent after using her English voice everywhere else), a French music hall that came to prominence in the late-19th and early-20th centuries as an exotic revue and unlikely landmark of the négritude movement (the French equivalent of the Harlem Renaissance), notably launching the career of, among others, Joséphine Baker. Its history is genuinely interesting, but not to audiences who likely haven't heard of it before listening to a song that does not describe the Folies Bergère in any detail, whose lyrics consist mostly of repeating the name of the establishment at a frantic pace without even making clear that it is, in fact, a place. "Be Italian," the song that comes closest to making your toe tap, concerns Saraghina, the prostitute Guido and his friends paid as a child to dance for them. Fergie, as Saraghina, fails utterly to match the perverse eroticism of the same moment in 8½: she's not grotesque enough to show the depths of Guido's depravity, nor is she remotely as seductive as Eddra Gale's original -- Fergie's idea of a seduction is the same pose people strike on Myspace too look attractive, which is incidentally the same as the Stanley Kubrick Evil Madman Pose: head titled down with eyes remaining parallel to the ground and staring fiercely. Marshall inept direction only makes everything worse, moving for close-ups when musicals should remain in long shot. If the musical truly is the measuring device for Hollywood's artistic mindset, then Marshall's invasive camera reflects the half-assed attempt to personalize everything without ever making films that are truly personal, and its frantic editing evidence of the current fad of desperately attempting to outrun the smell of the crap being made.

Nine's incessant monotony exposes a deep flaw in the genre: musicals these days are all flash but no magic; the old musicals were big and boisterous too, but they could absolutely overwhelm your senses with quality where now it's just more, more, more. Find me one moment in Nine, or Chicago or Moulin Rouge!, as jaw-droppingly choreographed as Donald O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh" workout in Singin' in the Rain or Bob Fosse and Tommy Rail's playful "duel" in My Sister Eileen. Find me a song as catchy as "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend." Find me a moment as perfect as the finale of Rain, in which Debbie Reynolds is revealed to be the true talent, a moment so splendid and majestic that every frame burns with such white-hot passion that the celluloid threatens to explode. I'll take the three-strip purity of Rain over these hollow, polychromatic displays any day of the week*.

I considered revisiting 8½ before watching Nine, more because it's been so long since I've seen it that I've forgotten details than as a base of comparison; sadly, I hocked my Criterion copy in preparation for their upcoming Blu-Ray re-release. It's just as well: even if I wouldn't have watched it to judge Nine by how it stacked up to Fellini's masterpiece, the act of watching such a perfect dreamscape would have only made the boring nightmare of this experience all the more unbearable. Rarely has such a great cast been so viciously squandered, and Nine never amounts to anything more than a bunch of film stars trying to make themselves into triple threats, which is somewhat true, as they take roles that might have been occupied by those who truly can sing and dance and might have breathed some life into this turgid musical.

Why then, am I giving this film two stars? Because one person actually works: Penélope Cruz. I've long undersold Cruz as an actress, but I'm running out of tangible excuses. How many more films does she have to steal -- Vicky Christina Barcelona, her fantastic collaborations with Pedro Almodóvar, Elegy -- before I shut my fat mouth? Here, she plays Guido's mistress, a bundle of pure sex in a film that is trying to be just that and fails everywhere else. She walks away from a film featuring Judi Dench, Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard and Sophia Loren as if they were nonprofessionals (even though she doesn't do much acting and can't anyway, not with a role as horribly written as Carla), and her tongue-numbing, knee-weakening dance near the start will make you praise the Lord for making Spain. Even when she has to deliver some cringe-inducing bits of dialogue like, "I'll be waiting for you...with my legs open," she is tantalizing and maddening and tragic and awe-inspiring. Dios te bendiga, Penélope.



*That's not to say that I'm judging this film against Singin' in the Rain. This film has enough problems without comparing it to the zenith of the genre.

There Will Be Blood

1898. A man picks at the stone in a deep well, alone, hoping to find silver. Eventually, he falls and breaks his leg and must save himself. Several years later, he runs a small team of drillers and has abandoned silver for oil. In 1911, he runs a fledgling empire. We move through these periods with little diegetic sound, as buzzing violins crescendo over the desert landscapes.

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood announces a fascinating new direction for one of the most promising of America's modern directors. I admit that, beloved as Magnolia was, I found it a pretentious, rambling (and not in a fun or insightful way) mess that tried to mix Altman's style of film with Scorsese' type of filmmaking and ended up a hollow masturbatory exercise that called more attention to the camera itself than the objects it captured. However, Boogie Nights remains one of my favorite films, and I keep bumping Punch-Drunk Love farther and farther up my queue until it is, at last, on deck.

Why do I bring this up? Well, this is a blog, so it's only fitting I talk about meaningless personal business, but also because it gives me a certain sense of happiness knowing that, even if I detest Punch-Drunk, I know that PTA never lost it because I've seen this film. Of course, his prior filmography is totally irrelevant, because Anderson tosses out his ensemble casts and surreality in favor of a stark vastness that explores a man as insoluble as Iago, and almost as sinister. It's as if he threw out Altman for Kubrick.

And he succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Anderson still has a certain Scorsesian restlessness with his camera, but he puts it to good use here, moving along the barren lands, zooming in and out, locking into place in moments of minimalistic beauty. With this camera he follows Daniel Plainview, the oil man we meet at the start. Daniel Day-Lewis offers up possibly the finest performance of his career in terms of thematic weight as Plainview (though I'd still side with his Christy Brown in My Left Foot for the sheer effort involved), all the more surprising when you consider how little depth the character has.

That lack of depth threw me a bit at first. I've loved the film ever since I first saw it, but I could never figure out Plainview. At last, after multiple viewings and endless research, I've finally learned that that's the point: Plainview is a man so emotionally guarded and self-absorbed that we are never meant to learn about him. In that respect, it shares more than a little with Citizen Kane, a comparison I've seen in a number of more glowing reviews; like Kane, Plainview forms the nucleus for the story, yet the audience does not and cannot learn all or even most there is to know about the man. Both are character studies whose characters are too complex to be truly studied.



For that reason, the film feels intensely claustrophobic despite its epic visuals. Many, including myself, have compared it to Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: The Space Odyssey, from their use of terrifying glissandi violin movements over a vast setting with sparse dialogue. However, there's a fundamental difference between the two: Kubrick's film dealt, as most of his oeuvre did, with the loss of individuality. Kubrick always strove to reduce the individual to the nothingness he really was, and 2001 was his ultimate (and, funnily enough, his most sentimental) statement on the future of the individual: absorption into the universe and cold machinery, allowing man's evolution. There Will Be Blood, on the other hand, shows us a man who will not be swallowed whole by the space around him, a man who in fact comes to dominate that space.

Plainview regards everything around him as unworthy. Anderson captures the majesty around the character, but Daniel is always the dominant object in the frame. Endless films exist about self-centered anti-heroes, but here at last is true solipsism: if characters are standing damn near right next to Daniel they tend to stand at least slightly out of focus. This is Daniel's film, and it is why we learn so little. Precious few ever really move into focus (and thus into Plainview's limited consideration), and even then they do not always stay there. One is Daniel's son H.W.; when we first see him in adolescence, he stands behind his father in town meetings, seen but not heard, putting a pretty face on a "family business." When an accident at the derrick leaves the boy deaf, Daniel shows genuine compassion towards his son, even if he has even more difficulty showing it. Their relationship eventually crumbles in a flurry of cruelty, but the more I see the film the more I think it's Daniel's way of freeing his son.



Later in the film, a man shows up in the town Plainview has taken over claiming to be his half-brother Henry. After a few stories check out, Daniel surprisingly invites him into his fold, confiding in him more than any other character. In one particularly memorable scene (my favorite, as a matter of fact), Daniel gives us the closest thing we get to a breakthrough when he says to Henry "There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money that I can get away from everyone...I see the worst in people. I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I've built my hatreds up over the years, little by little, Henry... to have you here gives me a second breath. I can't keep doing this on my own with these... people." He's not a man who studied humanity and found nothing worth saving; he started there and moved on to other things. When he learns the truth about Henry, there's genuine pain in Daniel's eyes, not because he feels betrayed but because it means he'll have to remain amongst mortals.

But the most important supporting character is certainly Eli Sunday, played with gusto by Paul Dano. A young Pentecostal preacher, Eli, in a subtle but obvious way, ran the town before Daniel showed up looking for oil on a tip from Eli's twin Paul. Then Daniel shows up and promises the barren town prosperity, black gold and irrigated crops and new buildings, and he sells it all so beautifully I wanted to give him money. The townspeople look to Daniel and Eli as pillars, saviors even: Eli speaks in tongues and "heals" his parishioners, the spiritual savior. Daniel, on the other hand, will bring these people out of hardship through pure capitalism: through him at last comes the capacity to grow grain on their rocky soil and to rebuild rotting shanties into sturdy, beautiful buildings.



The two immediately enter into a battle of wits for supremacy, not of the town, but of the person who dares count himself as an equal. Eli, though certainly a believer, gains power from his status, to the point that I wondered if he considered himself to be the true vessel of the Lord. Daniel establishes his distaste for religion, and for the first time the townspeople have a choice, and it enrages Eli. Over the course of decades the two go about their back and forth: Daniel snubs Eli's offer to bless the well and ignores his initial promise of the $5,000 bonus for Eli's church, and Eli ultimately shames Daniel in front of the congregation. Finally the two reunite in the middle of the Depression, as a broken and bankrupt Eli comes to the still-affluent Daniel to beg for money, and the sadistic delight on Plainview's face is even more disturbing than his wheezing laugh following his speech to Henry.

Why, if this film has no real underlying point, is it so good? Yes, capitalism and religion are both touched upon, and it's possible to draw meaning from the both, but they're chiefly weapons Daniel and Eli use to infuriate one another: Eli exploits Daniel's money-grubbing by forcing him out of 10 grand at the start of the business venture, while Daniel resists any attempt to bring religion anywhere near him or his rig. Some have complained of a lack of female characters, but I agree with it actually; this is a film from Daniel's POV, and it only makes sense that a man so thoroughly cut off from everything would gladly cut out 50% of the world's population on the basis of some anatomical difference. There is one little girl, Mary, who in another film would have been almost central to the proceedings. We meet her when she's about H.W.'s age, and the two grow together, fall in love, and get married. Mary even learns sign language for her beau. But she gets relegated to the background, barely appearing and usually silent when she does turn up, because Daniel simply doesn't care about her.

Perhaps the reason I love the film so dearly is that it so thoroughly plays against type. People label it a Western, and that's not a ridiculous claim, but I find myself increasingly disagreeing with the term; traditional Westerns show us life as it was in the Old West, generally with some romantic, archetypal ideal attached, while revisionist Westerns tend to make some sort of claim about traditional Westerns, a deconstruction of the myth that shows us how life really was. This does neither; the craggy desert is simply a backdrop for a completely inexplicable man who moves through it with such contempt and disregard the setting melts away, and Johnny Greenwood's unsettling score cuts into the pure hatred within. We have anti-heroes and anti-villains. Meet Daniel Plainview: the anti-character.