Editorials > Does one really great performance make an entire movie?

I can’t say I’m surprised that Daniel Day-Lewis is getting so much critical attention for his role in There Will Be Blood. He’s already won a Critic’s Choice award, and he’s most certainly going to get a Oscar nomination, at the very least. Not to suggest he doesn’t deserve it, of course: his portrayal of Daniel Plainview, oil tycoon and all around fucking asshole, is nothing short of astonishing. With every glance, every line delivery, one can’t help but see past Plainview’s faux-amiable exterior into the evil, mad sonofabitch who lies within. Daniel Day-Lewis is almost too good in the film.

Which is sort of the problem.

There Will Be Blood is, at its heart, a character piece. Outside of Plainview’s attempts to build his oil empire, there’s really no plot to speak of: the film just throws unfortunate events at Plainview, and the audience gets to see how he reacts to them and how he changes over time. The problem with this, if it can even be called a problem, is that Day-Lewis is such a damned good actor that you can see the unfettered evil which isn’t supposed to be shown until the final scenes as early as the first five minutes of the film. Day-Lewis is a subtle, but transparent actor: you can see the wheels turning in Plainview’s head, the fake smiles, the secret hatred for everyone around him. Even at the beginning of the film, when we’re supposed to at least partially sympathize with him, Day-Lewis hints at Plainview’s ruthless evil. 

Unfortunately, this makes the rest of the movie kind of dull. As Day-Lewis remains so consistently great and expressive throughout, the audience can almost see the end of the film reflected in Plainview’s eyes – we assume Plainview will get worse and worse as time goes on, and we are right. Narratively, there are no surprises. A scene begins where Plainview hints he might want to kill someone, and it ends with him doing so. Plainview is forced to choose between family and oil, and the audience knows how he’ll decide before Plainview takes his first step. Great “character piece” films – like, say, Citizen Kane – build drama through clever structuring and gradual, somewhat unpredictable protagonist development. We meet Charles Foster Kane when he is relatively young and innocent, we see him grow ambitious, we see him fall in love and show his human side, and then we ultimately watch him crash and burn. Charles Foster Kane has a complex, interesting character arc – Daniel Plainview does not.

He’s interesting to watch thanks to Day-Lewis’s nuanced performance, but that same performance makes his character “turns,” if they can even be called that, completely predictable. And thus, the entire film is turned into nothing more than a pedestal for Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance.

Is this admissible? Does the quality of Day-Lewis’s performance alone make up for the fact that that very same performance actually ruins the plot? The critics seem to think so, but the theatre I viewed it in – a theatre which, by all accounts, could be classified as an “arthouse” – was filled with shrugs and raised eyebrows rather than gasps or screams in the final moments of the film, when Plainview commits his last act of pure evil. It’s not that the scene was bad in and of itself – it’s just that we’d spent the last two hours seeing progressively more violent and unsurprising versions of the exact same scene.