Thomas Pynchon: A Journey Into the Mind of [P], 2001
Written and Directed by Donatello Dubini and Fosco Dubini
96 minutes
Who exactly is this movie intended for? I'm a huge Pynchon fan who has read each of his books at least once and who has spent some amount of time learning as much as can be known about the man and his works, so I can watch Journey and fill in some of the gaps in the film that the casual viewer cannot. But the film spends so much time trying (ineptly) to convince me of its own insight and "strangeness" that it doesn't give me what I'd most like to have: information about the subject of the film.
Thomas Pynchon is the author of six novels, from V. in 1963 to Against the Day in 2006. He is incredibly reclusive, has never given an interview or commented on his dense, mazelike novels, and indeed hasn't been photographed in decades. A handful of photos of the author exist, all of them from before he was an author, mostly from his days in college or in the Navy. It is natural for those of us who love the writings to attempt to puzzle out the author's life, and a film that attempted to use what little we know of Pynchon's biography to flesh out some of the stranger passages in his novels would be a fascinating one. But that is not this film.
We know, for instance, that Pynchon based much of the family history of the protagonist of his greatest work, Gravity's Rainbow, on his own blue-blood heritage. We know that Pynchon spent some of his time living on a commune in the Pacific Northwest, an experience that seems to inform a good chunk of 1990's Vineland. We know that he spent time in the Navy, and his experiences must have had some influence on the characters in V.. A Journey Into the Mind of [P] mentions none of this, not even brushing by these kinds of elements, and instead focuses on making wild conspiratorial rantings about connections between Thomas Pynchon and the military-industrial complex.
Early in the film, we are told that Pynchon lived in Mexico City at the same time that Lee Harvey Oswald visited the city. Did they meet? Did they ride the same train? intones an interviewee, a Pynchon researcher who seems from the evidence in the film to have taken a few too many drugs back in the day. This is followed by a series of propaganda-like images showing Oswald's life, arrest. and eventual murder at the hands of Jack Ruby. Certainly paranoia is an aspect of Pynchon's writing, but connecting him with Oswald? Really?
The film suggests that perhaps Pynchon had a history that he was afraid would get out if he became a public figure, a suggestion bolstered by an interview with a man who knew Pynchon in the late sixties and early seventies. This gentleman (sorry to be vague about the names, but I can't find references to the interviewees on the web and I already sent the disc back to Netflix) also intones deeply that Pynchon may have been involved in the military testing of LSD, "just like Timothy Leary." So, you know, consider the source. The recollections of those who once knew Pynchon are interesting and useful insofar as they illuminate the man, but less so once they become more fodder for the grist mill.
A real lost opportunity is the interview with an ex-lover of Pynchon, a woman who was the inspiration for "Bianca," from GR. What was he like as a man? As a lover? Where did they go for fun? What kinds of books, movies did he like? Was he introspective? Depressed? Joyful? Aside from a brief discussion of Pynchon's desire to protest the Vietnam War in Chicago, we get none of this; instead we are bored by the woman's attempts to enter the apartment where Pynchon lived decades ago, hectoring the current occupant to let her (and the film crew) in for "just a minute." Sure, it's interesting to see where Pynchon lived while he created his greatest work, but by focusing on that instead of more substantive issues the filmmakers due their audience a disservice.
Another researcher talks about Pynchon's personal correspondence. We get a long intro in which he discusses his first reading of Gravity's Rainbow, and how he first got involved in Pynchomania, but when it comes to the real meat of the issue, he closes his files and pushes the camera away. Some of the documents were private correspondence, sure, and there are ethical issues, but to expose the audience to the kinds of wealth of material about Pynchon without even hinting to their content? Ridiculous. We're talking about literally boxes of papers, full of detail and insight, but as a viewer we are completely shut out. There's the real info, that's what might have been an interesting movie. The rest? Eh.
And that's the feeling I got at the end. Eh. Journey has some interesting bits that prevent it from being a total waste of time, but even within the confines of trying to understand such a reclusive artist, there are much better ways to go about it. I wonder what kind of film Werner Herzog would make about good ol' Ruggles....
Rating: D+
Showing posts with label Thomas Pynchon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thomas Pynchon. Show all posts
10 July 2008
Morgan Reading Mason & Dixon
Richard K. Morgan is reading Thomas Pynchon. Here's what he has to say about Mason & Dixon:
Yep, that about covers it. I've only read one of Morgan's works, but I've been eyeing Thirteen for awhile now, and this may be just the poke to get me to buy it and read it sooner rather than later.
Currently reading: Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. Colossal seven hundred and something page epic detailing the meeting and developing friendship of those two guys who drew the famous Mason-Dixon line – though at the stage I’ve reached, they haven’t yet reached America and are busy with astronomical duties for the Royal Society. Looking up, brooding and squabbling with each other, mostly. Doesn’t sound very interesting, I know, but trust me, this is some of Pynchon’s finest work. I mean, a book set in the eighteenth century and there’s a Bill Clinton joke on page 10! There’s also a primary narrator called the Reverend Cherrycoke, a family of mad Afrikaaners called the Vrooms (the mother soberly addressed as Vrou Vroom) and an intensely knowledgable ship’s crewmember and esteemed yarn spinner called Pat O’Brien. Catch that lot, if you can. Mason and Dixon features some of best laugh out loud tricks I’ve ever seen in modern literature, along with a poignant look at the dawn of the Age of Reason and the Independence of America. However, Linda should be warned it also features more than a few “curse” words, presumably demonstrating that Pynchon, like me, is suffering from stunted vocabulary development. If you can forgive him that, though, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Just make sure you set aside a good three weeks or so to read and digest it.
Yep, that about covers it. I've only read one of Morgan's works, but I've been eyeing Thirteen for awhile now, and this may be just the poke to get me to buy it and read it sooner rather than later.
06 April 2008
Booklog, The Crying of Lot 49
The Crying of Lot 49, 1965
by Thomas Pynchon
Trade Paperback, 152 pages
Written before V. but published after that novel's success, The Crying of Lot 49 has more in common with the short fiction in Pynchon's Slow Learner than any of his other novels. It is less than half the length of Vineland, Pynchon's second-shortest novel, and unlike any of the other books (mostly) follows a single protagonist down a (reasonably) straightforward plot. Pynchon himself is said to consider this a "journeyman effort," better than the "apprentice" works of his early short fiction but not up to the standard of his later novels.
He's probably too hard on himself. While Lot 49 is comparatively simple for those who have absorbed Pynchon's longer works, it's an excellent introduction to his writing, and stands as a great work in its own right. As the book opens, a young Southern California woman named Oedipa Maas is named the executor of the will of Pierce Inverarity, a former lover of hers. What starts out as a largely formal request ends up leading Oedipa into a twisty maze of maybe-conspiracies involving a shadowy postal service war from centuries past, a possible crime against humanity in the production of cigarette filters, a device that will violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics... in other words, into a crazy world full of the kinds of strangeness that is Pynchon's forte.
In this way, The Crying of Lot 49 provides a sort of introduction to Pynchon's work for those who are not already familiar with it, and a sort of filtering device for those who are. Oedipa Maas falls through the metaphorical rabbit hole into this strange world where no one seems innocent, a world filled with the cast-outs and burn-outs of society, a world denied by the Authorities, whether they be in government, industry, academia, what have you. Or does she? -- there is some indication that Pierce might have set up the whole thing to simply play a trick on poor insulated and isolated Oedipa. It is the spectre of doubt, the sense that at any time the rug could be pulled from under your feet even after the wool has been pulled off of your eyes that makes Lot 49 (and by extension Pynchon's whole oevure) so compelling.
Perhaps we the reader are supposed to treat Pynchon's corpus the way Oedipa treats the sights she sees in the underworld in Crying of Lot 49. Perhaps Oedipa is in that sense a reader stand-in -- if so, the ending of the novel suggests that true understanding is forever out of our reach, that Someone or Something will forever keep us from the Truth. Perhaps. Pinning down exactly what Pynchon wants the reader to take away from any given passage is notoriously difficult, not least because passages often seem to contradict each other, and Meaning is elusive. Just as in life.
The Crying of Lot 49 is also memorable for its sense of fun and games, even if some of the humor is as pitch-black as it gets. In one memorable sequence (which was echoed later on in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse V, whether knowingly or not I can't say) Oedipa watches a movie on TV with a lawyer Paul Metzger which has (maybe) been aired out of sequence. During this scene Metzger is also seducing Oedipa and providing exposition to the reader, in what is one of the most convoluted and strange sequences I've read in any novel. That Pynchon pulls this off with humor, clarity, and Meaning is astonishing and gives indications of what we could expect from him later on.
My recommendation here: read it twice. The original hardcover (and the paperback I own) is 152 pages, and is perfectly able to be read in a single extended sitting. Reading it again soon thereafter helps to make some of the themes of the novel more clear, and to make sense of Pynchon's often obscure prose style. It's a strange read, but definitely worth the time for anyone looking to see what Pynchon is all about -- try Gravity's Rainbow later once you get to the point of this shorter work.
by Thomas Pynchon
Trade Paperback, 152 pages
Written before V. but published after that novel's success, The Crying of Lot 49 has more in common with the short fiction in Pynchon's Slow Learner than any of his other novels. It is less than half the length of Vineland, Pynchon's second-shortest novel, and unlike any of the other books (mostly) follows a single protagonist down a (reasonably) straightforward plot. Pynchon himself is said to consider this a "journeyman effort," better than the "apprentice" works of his early short fiction but not up to the standard of his later novels.
He's probably too hard on himself. While Lot 49 is comparatively simple for those who have absorbed Pynchon's longer works, it's an excellent introduction to his writing, and stands as a great work in its own right. As the book opens, a young Southern California woman named Oedipa Maas is named the executor of the will of Pierce Inverarity, a former lover of hers. What starts out as a largely formal request ends up leading Oedipa into a twisty maze of maybe-conspiracies involving a shadowy postal service war from centuries past, a possible crime against humanity in the production of cigarette filters, a device that will violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics... in other words, into a crazy world full of the kinds of strangeness that is Pynchon's forte.
In this way, The Crying of Lot 49 provides a sort of introduction to Pynchon's work for those who are not already familiar with it, and a sort of filtering device for those who are. Oedipa Maas falls through the metaphorical rabbit hole into this strange world where no one seems innocent, a world filled with the cast-outs and burn-outs of society, a world denied by the Authorities, whether they be in government, industry, academia, what have you. Or does she? -- there is some indication that Pierce might have set up the whole thing to simply play a trick on poor insulated and isolated Oedipa. It is the spectre of doubt, the sense that at any time the rug could be pulled from under your feet even after the wool has been pulled off of your eyes that makes Lot 49 (and by extension Pynchon's whole oevure) so compelling.
Perhaps we the reader are supposed to treat Pynchon's corpus the way Oedipa treats the sights she sees in the underworld in Crying of Lot 49. Perhaps Oedipa is in that sense a reader stand-in -- if so, the ending of the novel suggests that true understanding is forever out of our reach, that Someone or Something will forever keep us from the Truth. Perhaps. Pinning down exactly what Pynchon wants the reader to take away from any given passage is notoriously difficult, not least because passages often seem to contradict each other, and Meaning is elusive. Just as in life.
The Crying of Lot 49 is also memorable for its sense of fun and games, even if some of the humor is as pitch-black as it gets. In one memorable sequence (which was echoed later on in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse V, whether knowingly or not I can't say) Oedipa watches a movie on TV with a lawyer Paul Metzger which has (maybe) been aired out of sequence. During this scene Metzger is also seducing Oedipa and providing exposition to the reader, in what is one of the most convoluted and strange sequences I've read in any novel. That Pynchon pulls this off with humor, clarity, and Meaning is astonishing and gives indications of what we could expect from him later on.
My recommendation here: read it twice. The original hardcover (and the paperback I own) is 152 pages, and is perfectly able to be read in a single extended sitting. Reading it again soon thereafter helps to make some of the themes of the novel more clear, and to make sense of Pynchon's often obscure prose style. It's a strange read, but definitely worth the time for anyone looking to see what Pynchon is all about -- try Gravity's Rainbow later once you get to the point of this shorter work.
16 March 2008
Tips for Reading Against the Day
This was linked by someone over on the P-list.
I'm re-reading Gravity's Rainbow now, with help by the Weisenburger companion, and most of those could also apply here. Can't wait to get back to ATD again, but since I'm re-reading them all in publication order it'll be awhile before I get back to it.
3. Whenever you do not know what is going on in the story, drink two cups of coffee and try again. If you still don’t get it, drink some NyQuil. If you’re STILL having no luck, ask your friend with adult A.D.D. for his “concentration pills” and dissolve them in Red Bull and vodka and sit naked in a circle of scented candles with Radiohead playing in the background … and then chant the many permutations of the name of God.
[...]
5. When you are in bad neighborhoods, bring Against the Day with you. You can throw it at someone and hurt them so that they won’t steal it from you. Or you can cut a square out of every page so that you can keep your money in it, like in the movies. That way, when you get mugged, the stick-up kid will snatch the book, exclaim, “I couldn’t even get through The Crying of Lot 49,” and toss it back to you.
[...]
7. Don’t even think about CliffsNotes. They are longer than the novel itself. And they are written by Thomas Pynchon himself. In Esperanto. With invisible ink. And viewing them requires a special light filter used only by WWI-era Burmese cryptographer-assassins.
I'm re-reading Gravity's Rainbow now, with help by the Weisenburger companion, and most of those could also apply here. Can't wait to get back to ATD again, but since I'm re-reading them all in publication order it'll be awhile before I get back to it.
16 February 2008
Booklog, V.
V., 1963
by Thomas Pynchon
Hardcover, 492 pages
When writer/director Peter Bogdanovich saw his friend Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, he is purported to have said of it: "I'd seen the film for or five times before I noticed the story." Welles' response was, "That speaks well for the story," and Bogdanovich's response to that was, "No, no -- I mean I was looking at the direction."
I recount this anecdote because I've read all of Thomas Pynchon's works at least once, and some of them more than once, and I have only the vaguest notion of what the plots are really about. I was looking at the writing. And I think this is at least one reasonable way at approaching Pynchon's writing, at attempting to wrap your head around the way he views the world.
V. is his first novel, published in 1963, and I've now read it twice. The book follows two "main" characters, Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil, in plots that begin as radically divergent but eventually come together towards the end. (In this sense, the plot itself seems to form a sort of "V" itself.)
Profane is a discharged US Navy sailor who runs with The Whole Sick Crew, a group of bohemians living in hovels and having lots of sex and making lots of art/music, etc. Profane takes a series of low-paying jobs, including travelling under the streets of New York and killing alligators. He gets into torrid love affairs with no less than four women, and spends most of his time dealing with the consequences of such.
Stencil, on the other hand, is an aged world traveller. His father was a British spy and diplomat, and much of the novel is filled with long excerpts from his father's journals from years past. These journal entries are all regarding this mysterious figure "V." who may or may not be a woman, or a place, or.... Working out exactly who or what V. is becomes an obsession of Stencil's, and researching this topic through his travels and reading his father's notebooks provides the overall spine of the plot.
These two thread may sound fairly straightforward, if perhaps a bit convoluted, but if you know Pynchon you know that's not the whole story. Pynchon fills his novels with endless amounts of detail, dozens of supporting characters, scientific metaphors, literary allusions, etc. etc. etc. Characters pop up, are given a lengthy introduction of a page or two, have a few lines, then disappear for dozens of pages. The effect is bewildering, absorbing, and this is Pynchon's point in writing this way -- he is intentionally drawing the reader into the maze of the novel, forcing us to make decisions about what we feel is important and what isn't, only to prove us wrong by making nearly every element important, working on some grand scheme of literary allusions. To make it even worse, Pynchon has a devil-may-care style of detail, mentioning dates, places, events, and objects that send a modern reader scurrying to Wikipedia on a regular basis.
So, again, look at the writing, not the plot. The best way to approach this, at least for me, is to not allow myself to get drawn in so far that I lose the flow of the book. Reading Pynchon is to float on his language, to examine the allusions and strange imagery without necessarily feeling the need to grasp every aspect of it immediately. Those looking for pat solutions should look elsewhere than a Pynchon novel, and V. is no exception.
This very quality makes a review of a Pynchon novel almost superfluous. I could give examples of things I liked, of the basic thrust of the imagery, but in a very real sense each of us approaches these novels in our own way, and the experience is meant to be different for all. My understandings may differ from yours, and my approach may not be useful to you.
Still, it's possible to put together very vague generalities. More important than characters or plot in a Pynchon novel is the overall narrative theme, the central metaphor that influences the overall story that he wants to tell. Here it is the question of the animate and the inanimate, and especially the way that human beings have historically treated their fellow men as the latter rather than the former. This is most aptly illustrated in chapter nine, subtitled "Mondaugen's story," which takes place during the Herrero Wars in 1904, and is a sort of dress rehearsal for the Holocaust. The white colonists use their African conquests as slaves, sexual and otherwise, and even supposedly sympathetic characters are shown as dehumanizing their fellow man in fundamentally awful ways.
The sequence takes place in the approximate middle of the book, and if what has happened before was full of pratfalls and silliness (and in a sense it was), what comes after is never quite as much fun -- this sequence represents a sort of Original Sin for the novel, and the characters (and readers!) are never quite as innocent afterwards. The novel builds to a tour de force ending in which the identity of V. is (maybe) revealed, and in which that central metaphor of animate and inanimate comes to a sort of stark relief.
I have read V. twice and fully admit to not quite understanding it. I'm not even fully cognizant of the details of the plot. But I think that's Pynchon's goal, that we keep reading and re-reading in our attempt to understand, and that we eventually will fully appreciate the world that he has created for us. I don't think V. stands as one of the best of Pynchon's works, but it's a remarkable novel nonetheless, and is worthy of the detailed study is has received.
by Thomas Pynchon
Hardcover, 492 pages
When writer/director Peter Bogdanovich saw his friend Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, he is purported to have said of it: "I'd seen the film for or five times before I noticed the story." Welles' response was, "That speaks well for the story," and Bogdanovich's response to that was, "No, no -- I mean I was looking at the direction."
I recount this anecdote because I've read all of Thomas Pynchon's works at least once, and some of them more than once, and I have only the vaguest notion of what the plots are really about. I was looking at the writing. And I think this is at least one reasonable way at approaching Pynchon's writing, at attempting to wrap your head around the way he views the world.
V. is his first novel, published in 1963, and I've now read it twice. The book follows two "main" characters, Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil, in plots that begin as radically divergent but eventually come together towards the end. (In this sense, the plot itself seems to form a sort of "V" itself.)
Profane is a discharged US Navy sailor who runs with The Whole Sick Crew, a group of bohemians living in hovels and having lots of sex and making lots of art/music, etc. Profane takes a series of low-paying jobs, including travelling under the streets of New York and killing alligators. He gets into torrid love affairs with no less than four women, and spends most of his time dealing with the consequences of such.
Stencil, on the other hand, is an aged world traveller. His father was a British spy and diplomat, and much of the novel is filled with long excerpts from his father's journals from years past. These journal entries are all regarding this mysterious figure "V." who may or may not be a woman, or a place, or.... Working out exactly who or what V. is becomes an obsession of Stencil's, and researching this topic through his travels and reading his father's notebooks provides the overall spine of the plot.
These two thread may sound fairly straightforward, if perhaps a bit convoluted, but if you know Pynchon you know that's not the whole story. Pynchon fills his novels with endless amounts of detail, dozens of supporting characters, scientific metaphors, literary allusions, etc. etc. etc. Characters pop up, are given a lengthy introduction of a page or two, have a few lines, then disappear for dozens of pages. The effect is bewildering, absorbing, and this is Pynchon's point in writing this way -- he is intentionally drawing the reader into the maze of the novel, forcing us to make decisions about what we feel is important and what isn't, only to prove us wrong by making nearly every element important, working on some grand scheme of literary allusions. To make it even worse, Pynchon has a devil-may-care style of detail, mentioning dates, places, events, and objects that send a modern reader scurrying to Wikipedia on a regular basis.
So, again, look at the writing, not the plot. The best way to approach this, at least for me, is to not allow myself to get drawn in so far that I lose the flow of the book. Reading Pynchon is to float on his language, to examine the allusions and strange imagery without necessarily feeling the need to grasp every aspect of it immediately. Those looking for pat solutions should look elsewhere than a Pynchon novel, and V. is no exception.
This very quality makes a review of a Pynchon novel almost superfluous. I could give examples of things I liked, of the basic thrust of the imagery, but in a very real sense each of us approaches these novels in our own way, and the experience is meant to be different for all. My understandings may differ from yours, and my approach may not be useful to you.
Still, it's possible to put together very vague generalities. More important than characters or plot in a Pynchon novel is the overall narrative theme, the central metaphor that influences the overall story that he wants to tell. Here it is the question of the animate and the inanimate, and especially the way that human beings have historically treated their fellow men as the latter rather than the former. This is most aptly illustrated in chapter nine, subtitled "Mondaugen's story," which takes place during the Herrero Wars in 1904, and is a sort of dress rehearsal for the Holocaust. The white colonists use their African conquests as slaves, sexual and otherwise, and even supposedly sympathetic characters are shown as dehumanizing their fellow man in fundamentally awful ways.
The sequence takes place in the approximate middle of the book, and if what has happened before was full of pratfalls and silliness (and in a sense it was), what comes after is never quite as much fun -- this sequence represents a sort of Original Sin for the novel, and the characters (and readers!) are never quite as innocent afterwards. The novel builds to a tour de force ending in which the identity of V. is (maybe) revealed, and in which that central metaphor of animate and inanimate comes to a sort of stark relief.
I have read V. twice and fully admit to not quite understanding it. I'm not even fully cognizant of the details of the plot. But I think that's Pynchon's goal, that we keep reading and re-reading in our attempt to understand, and that we eventually will fully appreciate the world that he has created for us. I don't think V. stands as one of the best of Pynchon's works, but it's a remarkable novel nonetheless, and is worthy of the detailed study is has received.
09 February 2008
Thom Yorke is reading Pynchon
From that Rolling Stone cover story, comes this feature about Radiohead's current inspirations.
Yeah, it's true that in some ways Gravity's Rainbow is easier to get into than V., but Rainbow was published in 1973, a dozen years after his first. Granted, that's now over forty years ago, but Pynchon's only published three novels and one short story collection since then...
More stuff later, I'm being lazy today.
"I just started Gravity's Rainbow. I tried reading it once before, but this time around it's much more fun. It's a really early one, isn't it? This one seems easier to get into than V." — Thom Yorke
Yeah, it's true that in some ways Gravity's Rainbow is easier to get into than V., but Rainbow was published in 1973, a dozen years after his first. Granted, that's now over forty years ago, but Pynchon's only published three novels and one short story collection since then...
More stuff later, I'm being lazy today.
31 January 2008
Awesome find!
I was wandering around Booklegger yesterday waiting on a friend I was meeting for lunch, and look what I found:
This is a hardcover copy of Thomas Pynchon's V., albeit a second edition, and it only cost me four bucks. How awesome is that?
This is the book in its new home on my Pynchon shelf. (Not pictured: my trade paper of Crying of Lot 49, my hardcover and trade paper editions of Against the Day. Erroneously placed, my hardcover edition of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, a series that I'm sure I'm going to get around to finishing Any Day Now....
This is a hardcover copy of Thomas Pynchon's V., albeit a second edition, and it only cost me four bucks. How awesome is that?
This is the book in its new home on my Pynchon shelf. (Not pictured: my trade paper of Crying of Lot 49, my hardcover and trade paper editions of Against the Day. Erroneously placed, my hardcover edition of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, a series that I'm sure I'm going to get around to finishing Any Day Now....
28 January 2008
Pynchon and Anderson
Ever since drawing the parallel between Thomas Pynchon and Paul Thomas Anderson in my review of There Will Be Blood, I've been considering the connections between their works. Here's a lighthearted little bit.
Hard Eight, Anderson's first film, is like the stories in Slow Learner. Shows promise, but still existing within genre, and without the dizzying complexity that characterize the later works of both artists.
Boogie Nights is V., the first major work by both narrative artists. Hugely promising of things to come, both works shot their respective authors to a level of stardom in their respective communities.
Magnolia is Against the Day. Both are huge, long, masterful works that have been criticized as overindulgent, but which are embraced by fans nonetheless.
Punch-Drunk Love is Crying of Lot 49. Both are the shortest works of the respective artists, and represent a sort of "diddling play" with the tools of their medium.
There Will Be Blood is Gravity's Rainbow. It's tempting to call this Mason & Dixon, as both works deal with long-past historical fiction, but I suspect that in both cases the works in question will be considered to be the best works the artists ever create. Of course, Anderson is still young, and he may have an ever greater masterpiece in him, but right now I think it's fair to connect the two.
Okay, now I'm going to shut up about There Will Be Blood for awhile.
Hard Eight, Anderson's first film, is like the stories in Slow Learner. Shows promise, but still existing within genre, and without the dizzying complexity that characterize the later works of both artists.
Boogie Nights is V., the first major work by both narrative artists. Hugely promising of things to come, both works shot their respective authors to a level of stardom in their respective communities.
Magnolia is Against the Day. Both are huge, long, masterful works that have been criticized as overindulgent, but which are embraced by fans nonetheless.
Punch-Drunk Love is Crying of Lot 49. Both are the shortest works of the respective artists, and represent a sort of "diddling play" with the tools of their medium.
There Will Be Blood is Gravity's Rainbow. It's tempting to call this Mason & Dixon, as both works deal with long-past historical fiction, but I suspect that in both cases the works in question will be considered to be the best works the artists ever create. Of course, Anderson is still young, and he may have an ever greater masterpiece in him, but right now I think it's fair to connect the two.
Okay, now I'm going to shut up about There Will Be Blood for awhile.
27 January 2008
Movielog, There Will Be Blood
There Will Be Blood
Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
based on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair
158 minutes
(You can read my review of the Upton Sinclair novel here.)
If you are the type of person who has ever tried to rate movies, or to rank them in any sort of "best of" list, whether by year, decade, whatever, then perhaps you'll understand a certain thing I've noticed. Every so often, there comes a film that is so strange, bold, audacious, brilliant, that it clearly belongs at the top of any such list, and yet to bestow upon it only the top spot on a best-of list seems somehow to diminish it. Examples of such films (to my mind, anyway) are My Dinner with Andre, the astounding documentary Hoop Dreams, and Todd Solondz's darkly funny and disturbing Happiness. Are these films better than Raiders of the Lost Ark, Pulp Fiction, and Pleasantville, each my personal pick for the "best of" that particular year? Well, yes and no, for while the former list is made up of undeniably brilliant films, they are strange, generally made outside of a genre or studio system, and are only diminished when compared to the other fare being made at that time. In a sense, they are timeless masterpieces, moving in directions unknown to other films, and with the kind of strange quirkiness that oftentimes puts off audiences.
I preface this review this way because I believe Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is just that kind of film. Is it necessarily better than something like No Country for Old Men? Depends on your criteria, of course, but while No Country exists within a genre and is understandable in those terms (even while it overflows the constraints of that genre and becomes the kind of philosophical piece rightly called genius), There Will Be Blood stands alone, stretching what it is possible to do with celluloid and light, inventing a new language of cinema, and placing its writer/director as quite possibly the single greatest living filmmaker. And yes, I mean exactly what I said there.
This film comes "based on" a novel by Upton Sinclair, but it's fairer to say that it was merely "inspired by" Sinclair's work. Sinclair's work is about a boy with a rich father who is tempted into socialism, but Anderson's film drops the entire socialism angle, keeps the boy as a child (until the very end), and focuses instead on the father. And while Sinclair's J. Albert Ross Sr. is a basically decent man who allows his greed to influence his humanity, Anderson's Daniel Plainview is all greed, all force, all malevolence -- the soliloquy he delivers in the trailer (which is also showcased about halfway through the movie) is very much the way he thinks. He hates people, wants no one but himself to succeed. J. Albert Ross was consumed by money, but Daniel Plainview is consumed by a hateful competition that descends into madness.
Plainview is played amazingly by Daniel Day-Lewis, and one of the triumphs of the performance is how now that I've seen Day-Lewis in this role, I can't imagine it being played by anyone else. Day-Lewis hasn't worked a lot recently, having appeared in only eight movies since 1990, but his reputation as one of the finest of all actors is well-deserved. Here he plays a character always on a knife-edge of greed and corruption, of hate and impudence, of need and avarice, but always compelling, and (strangely) always sympathetic, even towards the end when his behavior becomes monstrous. Large sections of this film are played without dialogue, or with simple dialogue that does not directly hint of his character's emotional state. Watch how Day-Lewis embues a simple "No" with shades of meaning that illuminate the horrors of his soul during a night scene involving a fire. Watch how his face contorts during a scene in a church, as he goes through emotional states unknown to those around him. Watch how he manipulates the townsfolk around him, convincing them that he has their best interests at heart.
A teaser poster for the film has the tagline, "When Ambition Meets Faith," and in this case the "faith" is represented by Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), who plays a faith-healing preacher of a tiny church who also happens to be the son of the man from whom Plainview buys the land he builds his oil wells upon. It is a mark of Dano's skills as a performer that even though he has much less screen time than Day-Lews (who is in very nearly every shot of the film), he exists as a reliable counterweight, and his performance does not suffer in comparison with the much more experienced Day-Lewis. And while Anderson doesn't imbue Eli with quite the same level of hucksterism that Sinclair did in his novel, Eli is himself not quite what he seems -- he is savvy, self-promoting, and uses his appearance of naivete to manipulate those around him. In a real sense, he and Plainview are dopplegangers, not opposites, and while the poster simplifies the conflict, the film is much more nuanced in terms of its view of what these two characters are really trying to do, and what they mean both to one another and to the society around them.
I can't let this entry end without discussing the score. Anderson has dropped longtime collaborator Jon Brion for Johnny Greenwood, the guitarist for Radiohead, and his work here is strange, dissonant, thematically off-putting for a period piece, and yet somehow perfect for the film. The music in Punch-Drunk Love was like a wave of sound encompassing the theater, oppressive and destructive in the way it represented the lead character's emotional trauma, and here Greenwood continues in the vein that Brion started, giving us a score that seems to encompass the complex personality of Plainview, and which prefigures and foreshadows the unimaginable future that Plainview has ahead of him. AMPAS rules prevented this score from being considered for an Oscar, and that's shameful -- this is among the best scores ever composed, and while I love Brion's work in Anderson's other films, I'd love to hear what Greenwood could do when teamed with PTA's sensibilities again.
I haven't even touched on many of the amazing things in this film. Partly because it would give away spoilers, but partly because this film is astonishing and genius from beginning to end, with nearly every shot, every moment, every camera move, providing the audience with yet another amazing sight, yet another revealation, yet another bit of character development. And yet this is not the brash young filmmaker whose work seemed insular and whose camerawork seemed flashy -- gone are the swish-pans that were so effective in Boogie Nights and Magnolia, gone are the huge casts of characters, the stylized dialogue, the smash-cuts. Anderson's work here is just as bold, but he has matured as an artist, and uses his techniques more sparingly, with a greater eye for composition, and without as great a need to show off what he can do with a camera.
This film starts as a study of prospecting around the turn of the 20th century, moves on to a tale of greed, and becomes a character study (two character studies!), then eventually ends on notes of jet-black comedy masked as in-depth character study (or is it the other way around?). Many viewers will be put off by this film, by its running-time, by its freedom from convention and ordinary narrative, by its long takes, by the madness of its central character. And yet the film will endure, will, I am sure, build up a reputation as one of the greatest of all films, will serve as a study of how good films can be.
Anderson is the cinematic equivalent of Thomas Pynchon, whose books are widely regarded as the height of genius but whose difficulty and density scare away readers, and whose works need multiple read-throughs to properly absorb. But in both cases the works are worth the trouble to study, and ultimately will likely last as long as people read and/or watch movies. There Will Be Blood is strange, long, diffcult to understand, with obsessive characters and obscure meanings. But it is worth the effort, worth the viewing, and if you see it theatrically it is worth the experience, which envelopes the screen like few other films I've ever seen. It's amazing, astonishing, brilliant, and one of the greatest films ever made.
Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
based on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair
158 minutes
(You can read my review of the Upton Sinclair novel here.)
If you are the type of person who has ever tried to rate movies, or to rank them in any sort of "best of" list, whether by year, decade, whatever, then perhaps you'll understand a certain thing I've noticed. Every so often, there comes a film that is so strange, bold, audacious, brilliant, that it clearly belongs at the top of any such list, and yet to bestow upon it only the top spot on a best-of list seems somehow to diminish it. Examples of such films (to my mind, anyway) are My Dinner with Andre, the astounding documentary Hoop Dreams, and Todd Solondz's darkly funny and disturbing Happiness. Are these films better than Raiders of the Lost Ark, Pulp Fiction, and Pleasantville, each my personal pick for the "best of" that particular year? Well, yes and no, for while the former list is made up of undeniably brilliant films, they are strange, generally made outside of a genre or studio system, and are only diminished when compared to the other fare being made at that time. In a sense, they are timeless masterpieces, moving in directions unknown to other films, and with the kind of strange quirkiness that oftentimes puts off audiences.
I preface this review this way because I believe Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is just that kind of film. Is it necessarily better than something like No Country for Old Men? Depends on your criteria, of course, but while No Country exists within a genre and is understandable in those terms (even while it overflows the constraints of that genre and becomes the kind of philosophical piece rightly called genius), There Will Be Blood stands alone, stretching what it is possible to do with celluloid and light, inventing a new language of cinema, and placing its writer/director as quite possibly the single greatest living filmmaker. And yes, I mean exactly what I said there.
This film comes "based on" a novel by Upton Sinclair, but it's fairer to say that it was merely "inspired by" Sinclair's work. Sinclair's work is about a boy with a rich father who is tempted into socialism, but Anderson's film drops the entire socialism angle, keeps the boy as a child (until the very end), and focuses instead on the father. And while Sinclair's J. Albert Ross Sr. is a basically decent man who allows his greed to influence his humanity, Anderson's Daniel Plainview is all greed, all force, all malevolence -- the soliloquy he delivers in the trailer (which is also showcased about halfway through the movie) is very much the way he thinks. He hates people, wants no one but himself to succeed. J. Albert Ross was consumed by money, but Daniel Plainview is consumed by a hateful competition that descends into madness.
Plainview is played amazingly by Daniel Day-Lewis, and one of the triumphs of the performance is how now that I've seen Day-Lewis in this role, I can't imagine it being played by anyone else. Day-Lewis hasn't worked a lot recently, having appeared in only eight movies since 1990, but his reputation as one of the finest of all actors is well-deserved. Here he plays a character always on a knife-edge of greed and corruption, of hate and impudence, of need and avarice, but always compelling, and (strangely) always sympathetic, even towards the end when his behavior becomes monstrous. Large sections of this film are played without dialogue, or with simple dialogue that does not directly hint of his character's emotional state. Watch how Day-Lewis embues a simple "No" with shades of meaning that illuminate the horrors of his soul during a night scene involving a fire. Watch how his face contorts during a scene in a church, as he goes through emotional states unknown to those around him. Watch how he manipulates the townsfolk around him, convincing them that he has their best interests at heart.
A teaser poster for the film has the tagline, "When Ambition Meets Faith," and in this case the "faith" is represented by Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), who plays a faith-healing preacher of a tiny church who also happens to be the son of the man from whom Plainview buys the land he builds his oil wells upon. It is a mark of Dano's skills as a performer that even though he has much less screen time than Day-Lews (who is in very nearly every shot of the film), he exists as a reliable counterweight, and his performance does not suffer in comparison with the much more experienced Day-Lewis. And while Anderson doesn't imbue Eli with quite the same level of hucksterism that Sinclair did in his novel, Eli is himself not quite what he seems -- he is savvy, self-promoting, and uses his appearance of naivete to manipulate those around him. In a real sense, he and Plainview are dopplegangers, not opposites, and while the poster simplifies the conflict, the film is much more nuanced in terms of its view of what these two characters are really trying to do, and what they mean both to one another and to the society around them.
I can't let this entry end without discussing the score. Anderson has dropped longtime collaborator Jon Brion for Johnny Greenwood, the guitarist for Radiohead, and his work here is strange, dissonant, thematically off-putting for a period piece, and yet somehow perfect for the film. The music in Punch-Drunk Love was like a wave of sound encompassing the theater, oppressive and destructive in the way it represented the lead character's emotional trauma, and here Greenwood continues in the vein that Brion started, giving us a score that seems to encompass the complex personality of Plainview, and which prefigures and foreshadows the unimaginable future that Plainview has ahead of him. AMPAS rules prevented this score from being considered for an Oscar, and that's shameful -- this is among the best scores ever composed, and while I love Brion's work in Anderson's other films, I'd love to hear what Greenwood could do when teamed with PTA's sensibilities again.
I haven't even touched on many of the amazing things in this film. Partly because it would give away spoilers, but partly because this film is astonishing and genius from beginning to end, with nearly every shot, every moment, every camera move, providing the audience with yet another amazing sight, yet another revealation, yet another bit of character development. And yet this is not the brash young filmmaker whose work seemed insular and whose camerawork seemed flashy -- gone are the swish-pans that were so effective in Boogie Nights and Magnolia, gone are the huge casts of characters, the stylized dialogue, the smash-cuts. Anderson's work here is just as bold, but he has matured as an artist, and uses his techniques more sparingly, with a greater eye for composition, and without as great a need to show off what he can do with a camera.
This film starts as a study of prospecting around the turn of the 20th century, moves on to a tale of greed, and becomes a character study (two character studies!), then eventually ends on notes of jet-black comedy masked as in-depth character study (or is it the other way around?). Many viewers will be put off by this film, by its running-time, by its freedom from convention and ordinary narrative, by its long takes, by the madness of its central character. And yet the film will endure, will, I am sure, build up a reputation as one of the greatest of all films, will serve as a study of how good films can be.
Anderson is the cinematic equivalent of Thomas Pynchon, whose books are widely regarded as the height of genius but whose difficulty and density scare away readers, and whose works need multiple read-throughs to properly absorb. But in both cases the works are worth the trouble to study, and ultimately will likely last as long as people read and/or watch movies. There Will Be Blood is strange, long, diffcult to understand, with obsessive characters and obscure meanings. But it is worth the effort, worth the viewing, and if you see it theatrically it is worth the experience, which envelopes the screen like few other films I've ever seen. It's amazing, astonishing, brilliant, and one of the greatest films ever made.
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