John Crowley's LJ (RSS Feed)
02-22-2008, 04:38 AM
Saw There Will Be Blood the other night. Daniel Day Lewis remarkable as advertised, despite the somewhat off-putting resemblance to a Tom Sellek who had died and gone to hell). But more remarkable to me in the course of the first hour and a half or more (up to Daniel's abandonment of the son perhaps) was how thrillingly and amazingly rich in detail and milieu it was. I thought, What is the use of novels now if film can do this -- these utterly authentic visions of a time, place, character in action, etc. -- like Balzac only more so. Every shoe-button, dusty shovel, rusty gear, hat, plank, gun enriched and modified the characters and their behavior. The gear they carried going quail-hunting was so elaborate that it actually underscored the deception they intended.
Then it became increasingly muddled and unsatisfactory as characters behaved in strange and unlikely ways only so that vivid confrontations and "beats" could be made to happen, and it began to resemble other novel-like movies in becoming episodic and undramatic (like a novel) without the richness of complex motivation and depth of character, melodramatic like film but without the clean simple story line. Absurdities came to the fore. (How exactly did he drain the oil field with his long straw if he only laid a pipeline across it? Why (as L. pointed out) ws he unable to speak after going deaf, and need to learn sign language? People who can speak can still speak after they lose their hearing, duh, though it does get less clear over time. And (my daughter points out) he didn't speak a word before becoming deaf anyway. Huge swathes of story seem to be left out (why does his son hate him? WHy does he hate his son?) In the end all it had was a moral: The love of money is the root of all evil; absolute capitalism corrupts absolutely. A minor league Citizen Kane, which was cinematic not novelistic but achieved the complexities through artifice.
(Original Post) (http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/79443.html)
Then it became increasingly muddled and unsatisfactory as characters behaved in strange and unlikely ways only so that vivid confrontations and "beats" could be made to happen, and it began to resemble other novel-like movies in becoming episodic and undramatic (like a novel) without the richness of complex motivation and depth of character, melodramatic like film but without the clean simple story line. Absurdities came to the fore. (How exactly did he drain the oil field with his long straw if he only laid a pipeline across it? Why (as L. pointed out) ws he unable to speak after going deaf, and need to learn sign language? People who can speak can still speak after they lose their hearing, duh, though it does get less clear over time. And (my daughter points out) he didn't speak a word before becoming deaf anyway. Huge swathes of story seem to be left out (why does his son hate him? WHy does he hate his son?) In the end all it had was a moral: The love of money is the root of all evil; absolute capitalism corrupts absolutely. A minor league Citizen Kane, which was cinematic not novelistic but achieved the complexities through artifice.
(Original Post) (http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/79443.html)