The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 2-8
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
If the Preston Sturges-penned The Power and the Glory inspired a more terrible account of America’s brutal capitalist striving in Welles’s Citizen Kane, that classic gave rise to Anderson’s still more savage rendering in There Will Be Blood. In the role that won him his second Oscar, Daniel Day-Lewis brands the screen with Daniel Plainview, a ruthlessly small-minded prospector who becomes a rich oilman, and whose success leaves him nothing but malicious wealth with which to bully and manipulate anyone who impedes him (including his adoptive son). When preacher and former business partner Eli Sunday, cannily played by Paul Dano, challenges the value of the solitary, alcoholic Plainview’s life, and later angles for his largesse, there’s hell to pay. The financial crisis may have produced more nuanced movies on the general theme of capitalism. J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year, for instance, revives a warts-and-all interpretation of the system as a great if messy equalizer and a kind of quasi-religious pursuit that virtue can harness (and vice versa). But Anderson’s film offers a more pessimistic and condemnatory, and, sadly, perhaps a more credible and durable view of an American way that gets you a private bowling alley, abundant milkshakes, and a lot of carnage. Jonathan Stevenson (March 5, 6, 11am at the Nitehawk; March 13, 7pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s “See It Big! Jack Fisk“)