By Kathleen Murphy and Jim Emerson
Special to MSN Movies

Dear Jim,

I'm livid. Just read an Esquire essay that dissed Daniel Day-Lewis as "the screen's most gifted ham," and wrote off "There Will Be Blood" as an "immensely entertaining slab of bloody red meat." No real evidence for either assertion was offered.

This kind of journalistic drool makes me see red. Especially when I see/feel Day-Lewis' Oscar-nominated performance in "Blood" as authentically terrifying, a radical evocation of an American "Aguirre: The Wrath of God." The actor seems to be possessed by Daniel Plainview -- as he clearly was by Christy Brown in "My Left Foot," for whom he literally sacrificed all physical grace in order to fully inhabit a broken body.

Like the dissonant sounds and music that thrum through so many scenes in the movie, Plainview operates against the grain of mundane, familiar humanity -- and Day-Lewis plays him like fingernails on a chalkboard. A quintessentially American confidence artist, Plainview's a dynamo that runs hotter and faster than any flesh-and-blood metabolism. Day-Lewis isn't acting a human being at all, but a force, a power, ultimately a blight that haunts America still.

In "TWBB," Day-Lewis starts out as a driller worm, a black faceless thing in a dark hole. His very first communication is "No!", barely a discernible word buried in the awful, inhuman groans emitted after his bone-shattering fall into the mine. In fact, Plainview is pure negation, anti-life -- despite his sales spiel about the symbiosis of capitalism and civilization.

The faceless, subterranean thing rises, triumphantly brandishing a hand painted black with oil, an echo of those red hands left as signatures by primitive man on cave walls. Even as his drilling machines become more sophisticated, Plainview learns to fast-talk, to bend the herd to his will. Day-Lewis grows this snake in the American Eden into a suave demon in human flesh, conning sheep, "seeing the worst in people and not needing to see past that to get what I want." He makes the earth itself bleed black blood, and cuts every umbilical cord to human feeling.

"I am an oilman," Day-Lewis proclaims in buttery tones -- and the long, mustached mask of his face creases into a facsimile of good will and camaraderie. But the eyes burn with a fierce, alien intelligence that has nothing to do with the come-on. He's kin to Walter Huston's oily tempter in "The Devil and Daniel Webster."

I just can't fathom how Day-Lewis' profoundly intelligent, exhilarating performance can be dissed as that of a "gifted ham," so that one's pleasure in his singular accomplishment must be a guilty one.

KAM

Dear Kathleen,

Please do not slap, berate or bludgeon me when I say that I find your evocation of "There Will Be Blood" more compelling than the movie I saw. I'm not being flip: It feels to me like a draft for a picture that hadn't been fleshed out: "There Will Be Bloodlessness," as somebody else described it. In the middle of it all stands Daniel Day-Lewis, not quite in but right next to the character of Daniel Plainview. And if he's not a ham (Why shouldn't he be? Plainview is.), he's a juicy slice of peacock.

That "thrum" in the air that you describe sensing in "TWBB" is something I can feel vibrating in "No Country for Old Men" or "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" (to name two other acclaimed Westerns from the fall of 2007). In "TWBB" it manifests itself as the high-volume application of hard-working music cues, laid down in post-production over some footage of striking landscapes. That's the way movie scoring is done, of course, but while watching "TWBB" I'm continually distracted by a nagging awareness of the process. Day-Lewis' work likewise consists of the application and accumulation of effects -- strips of newspaper, gobs of flour paste, buckets of paint, and bits of tinfoil, carefully layered onto an inflated balloon to make a big fat piñata. Only somebody forgot to stuff it ...

JE

Jim,

I just have to interrupt: How can I not at least berate you, dear friend, when you suggest that my "compelling" argument is inspired not by "TWBB," but by ... what? My overactive imagination?

"TWBB" is no "bloodless" film. This American nightmare has plenty of juice, only it's acid and it burns. When I call Paul Thomas Anderson's movie something "new," I mean that he's working a kind of storytelling that doesn't really invite you in, but compels you to feel in your blood an awful process that is, as one reviewer aptly put it, both "sickening and elating." The unregenerate energy, call it a peculiarly American incubus, that has chosen to possess Daniel Plainview for a time finally leaves him empty and broken -- "finished" -- and moves on, seeking another vehicle for the dark, voracious appetite that is manifest destiny.

That thrumming I hear in "TWBB" doesn't unsettle the country of either the Coens or Jesse James. It's the actual medium/metabolism of "Blood." The whole of Anderson's discordant movie -- music/narrative/performance/image -- generates anxiety from the moment it begins. Living through "Blood" and Day-Lewis' performance is like trying to breathe air full of live wires.

KAM

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