Daniel Day-Lewis does Mr. Smith

Robert has said that my commentaries have been too one-sided. My defense was that I try to limit what I write to only what might be original thoughts. I'm not a reviewer. But I'll start by saying that Daniel Day is definitely fantastic. He's the slickest chameleon out there - I've always said so, incidentally. Paul Dano sucked, but let's keep this positive. The production work is roundly great, and as a work, it's more than well-realized. But one thing is for sure: Upton Sinclair would have hated this.

That's not necessarily the film's sentencing since, after all, PTA has said that it's not an adaptation. Then again, the fact that narrative has strayed so far from works like those of Mr. Sinclair might give us pause. Leaving out the studios for a moment, why does a screenwriter and director make a movie like this, and why do we as an audience enjoy it? Like The Aviator, There Will Be Blood is about a tough-as-nails robber-baron who stops at nothing to demolish his enemies and achieve success of American mythic proportions. But respected filmmakers can't get away with transparent bourgeois propaganda, not that I think they would ever consciously intend to. So we get the inevitable moral ambiguities and ultimately even condemnation of the central character - by the end of the film, we hate Plainview for his cruelty. In other words, we're not permitted to identify.

But here's the thing. Despite all that, can't we still see a kind of reverence for Plainview, for Howard Hughes, for William Randolph Hearst? A sense that now there's a real man! That's the part of these movies that makes me a little ill: the capitalist master as anti-hero. In the case of both The Aviator and this movie, the introspective is at the expense of even the briefest glimpse of class struggle. So despite the films internal strengths, for which there are many, for me it fails the test of greatness for everything it chooses not to see.