(Continued)

Yes, of course, Kathleen, that's exactly what I'm saying: You hallucinated it all!

Let me say I admire large parcels of Paul Thomas Anderson's film, and isolated moments in Day-Lewis' portrayal of Plainview, yet I don't think either taps very deeply into the well of mystery, resonance and American archetype. While Day-Lewis and Plainview get bigger and drunker and crazier as it goes along, the movie constricts thematically and narrows to a terminal point, pinning Plainview to its canvas like an insect specimen: Here is a moral tale of one greedy and misanthropic bastard, a moral gnat played with grand flapping flourishes by a big actor. Amidst the film's true believers, I feel a bit like Plainview after witnessing Eli Sunday's (Paul Dano) arthritic exorcism in the Church of the Third Revelation: "That was one goddamn helluva show." I don't share the revelation, either, yet I can't help but acknowledge the showmanship.

JE

But Jim, Day-Lewis' performance is necessarily operatic, over-the-top, designed to be a "goddamn helluva show." His Daniel Plainview isn't small, and he is an authentic American monster. He's blood-kin to Ahab, whose obsession with a white whale mirrors Plainview's hunger for the oil that runs in the earth's veins. Day-Lewis takes this black-hearted creature inside him, and lets him burn his way out. This takes courage, or a kind of madness, a willingness to act out on the grand scale. Isn't your argument for the craftiness and calculation of his creation precisely the criticism -- all art, not heart -- that's been leveled against the Coens' "No Country for Old Men," a film we both admire?

You say, "Here is a moral tale of one greedy and misanthropic bastard, a moral gnat played with grand flapping flourishes by a big actor." I believe Day-Lewis plays the hell out of a "greedy and misanthropic bastard," never once stepping outside his character to invite sympathy or empathy. What's "moral" got to do with it? Plainview embodies D.H. Lawrence's description of the "black, masterless" men who invaded the New World: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted."

The thrumming I hear in the very ground and air of "TWBB" grows out of Lawrence's insight that, from its founding, "America [was] tense with latent violence and resistance." We're talking metaphysics here, the stuff that made this country, dream and nightmare.

KAM

I have to tell you, Kathleen, when it comes to watching Day-Lewis, I fully acknowledge one fundamental reality over which I have very little conscious or rational control: I do not like him, Sam I Am. I do not like him in a hat, I do not like him with a bat.

That response is almost autonomic. From the moment I first recall seeing him in "My Beautiful Laundrette," I was distracted by something I can best describe as a feeling of preening inauthenticity. His presence feels to me like a cold, clammy handshake. Aggressively firm, determined to make an impression, but disingenuous and unconvincing.

OK, that's (im-)purely subjective. I know that some find him a charismatic fellow. Me, I look in his face and I see not the "inner life" of a character but a calculating acting machine -- the False Maria from "Metropolis" with a casing of skin. His craft is the most substantive thing about him, and his character only a shadow of his technique. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot: Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, falls ... the actor. And Day-Lewis falls with a metallic thud.

My impression of Day-Lewis isn't just that he's one of those actors behind whose eyes you can "see the wheels turning," or one of those, like Laurence Olivier or Peter Sellers, who like to put on wigs and mustaches and putty noses to disguise their lack of self. (They don't really "disappear" into a character; they were never there in the first place.) It's rooted in something else: Rather than being "in the moment," I often get the feeling that he's about five seconds ahead of the moment, planning and preparing what he's going to do next, having already left the present behind.

Let me leave off with one example from "TWBB" that illustrates how I think it and Day-Lewis go wrong. The movie's (black) heart is the speech Plainview gives to his presumed long-lost brother Henry, about how little use he has for people and how much he hates them. It's a breakthrough moment for Plainview, as he allows Henry into his confidence and his business: "I can't keep doing this on my own ... with these ... people." And then he laughs, dryly and too loud. It's too, too much: first the contemptuously pregnant pause, then the overemphasis on his disgust with the word "people," and finally that gilding-the-lily laugh. All Day-Lewis leaves out is the dastardly Snidely Whiplash twirl of his mustache.

Day-Lewis shoves me right out of the movie. The emotional void, the disgust, the bitterness -- they're all qualities Plainview also exhibits, but he's a better salesman. If Plainview is trying to bond with his brother over whiskey and misanthropy, or to test Henry to see if he shares Daniel's all-consuming envy and entitlement ("If it's in me, it's in you"), the oilman and the actor are overselling it egregiously. And that's the fatal miscalculation of this film and this performance: Day-Lewis isn't content to play this character; he stands apart from Plainview, judging him and telling us how we should feel about him, every step of the way. Plainview himself sucks the air out of any room he inhabits (even when he's outdoors), but I feel like Day-Lewis goes him one further, strutting and fretting to upstage his own character.

JE

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