Too great to be good

Does Daniel Day-Lewis' overwrought, Oscar-nominated turn in "There Will Be Blood" prove he's too taken with himself to surrender to a role?

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By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Arts & Entertainment, Academy Awards, Oscar Week 2008

Paramount Vantage / Melinda Sue Gordon

Daniel Day-Lewis as "Daniel" stars in Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood."

Feb. 20, 2008 | In Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, an oil magnate and single father whose drive to succeed is surpassed only by his bitter desire for everyone else to fail. At one point Plainview utters the telling line "There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking," and we're supposed to feel a chill: This is a man so isolated from his fellow human beings that he's unable to take even a splinter of pleasure in their company.

But in playing Daniel Plainview, Day-Lewis doesn't so much give a performance as offer a character design, an all-American totem painstakingly whittled from a twisted piece of wood. The care Day-Lewis has taken in building this character borders on obsession: His locution, the precise but laconic way he unpacks his tattered leather suitcase full of sentences, is borrowed straight from John Huston; he even mimics perfectly the grayed, whiskery undertones of Huston's voice. At first the choice seems brilliant. What voice better represents gruff, manly American determination than Huston's? Then again, once we notice an actor's choice, that choice is no longer transparent. And past a certain point -- once we begin to notice, and even perhaps marvel at, the way an actor squints to signal mistrust or doubt, or screws up the side of his mouth just so -- his choices move to the fore and the character recedes.

And that's how easily we can lose a great actor like Daniel Day-Lewis to greatness.

Day-Lewis' portrayal of Daniel Plainview is the kind of performance the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences -- that monolithic, unknowable group of temporary (very temporary) tastemakers -- tends to like, so it's no surprise he landed a best actor nomination. This is also the kind of turn that often wows moviegoers precisely because they don't know what to make of it. It's suitably mysterious ("Why is he doing that? I have no idea, but it's cool!") even as we can see its craftsmanship on display. As movie lovers, we want our actors to be able to do things we can't. If they're too natural -- too much like us -- whatever it is they're doing might not look like artistry. And what did we buy that movie ticket for, after all? I recently received an e-mail letter from a professional actor who was dismayed both by Day-Lewis' performance and by audiences' response to it: "Weird how so many people confuse 'acting that you can see' with great acting," he wrote -- as concise and honest a summation of the way we want to be impressed by craft as I've ever read.

The tragedy of Day-Lewis' performance in "There Will Be Blood" is that it defies the naturalism that made him a great actor -- and I use the word "great" unequivocally -- in the first place, as if he'd decided that naturalism is boring, that it no longer presents a challenge for him. Day-Lewis' Daniel Plainview is of a piece with Bill the Butcher, the character he played in Martin Scorsese's 2002 epic mess "Gangs of New York." Both performances are stuffed with exaggerated mannerisms and gimmickry: Day-Lewis struts through "Gangs" like a circus stilt-walker, as if, by design, he wants to seem larger than life. In both roles, he favors tortured locutions over simple declarativeness -- his "Gangs" accent is a thick, sludgy, semi-invented Noo Yawkese, probably calculated to suggest the savagery, the unvarnished manners, of a thug in old New York.

But do those choices tell us anything specific, anything that would otherwise be unknowable, about the inner lives of these characters? When I think of Daniel Plainvew and Bill the Butcher, I see technique, a set of artful schematics. When I think of the scruffy blond scrubber, Johnny, in "My Beautiful Laundrette" (1985), or the wheelchair-bound artist and writer Christy Brown in "My Left Foot" (1989), or the unjustly imprisoned Gerry Conlan in "In the Name of the Father" (1993), or Danny Flynn, the fighter with an IRA past in "The Boxer" (1997), I see people who live on the screen with so much clarity and vitality that the last thing I'm thinking of are the actorish smoke and mirrors it may have taken to put them there. In those performances -- and in numerous others, like those in "The Age of Innocence" (1993), "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (1988) and, most recently, "The Ballad of Jack and Rose" (2005), directed by Day-Lewis' wife, Rebecca Miller -- Day-Lewis cuts to the truth of his characters' lives by challenging us. There's no challenge in Daniel Plainview: No moment where we fear, against our better judgment, that we might have some confusing, conflicting emotions for him.

Day-Lewis may have located what he thinks is the heart of Daniel Plainview, but he has forgotten to take us with him on the journey. When Plainview quizzes his supposed half-brother (played by Kevin J. O'Connor) about facts from the family's past the impostor ought to know, we see blank calculation in his eyes but no glow of revelation, no gradual unfolding of rage or passion. Plainview's ruthlessness is a foregone conclusion -- there's no need for Day-Lewis to play much else beyond that ruthlessness, other than his character's ragged affection for his son (played by the movie's finest actor, the young Dillon Freasier). And even then, Day-Lewis plays emotions, not objectives -- that is, he decides on the emotion, or the effect, instead of allowing the emotion to emerge from the situation. We may know what Plainview is feeling (or not feeling) by the look on his face, but Day-Lewis, hampered by his heavy brocade cloak of technique, is less effective at navigating the fine gradations of action necessary to define a supposedly complex character. Why does Plainview feel and act the way he does? We never know. I'm not looking for anything as simple as a line of dialogue -- "He didn't get enough love from his mother" or some other such nonsense. What I long for in the character of Daniel Plainview, and don't get, are contradictions, elusive trails that might lead us into some hidden cave of thought, memory or desire. The performance is all intention, no exploration -- a conclusion instead of a set of questions.

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