For those who've been handicapping the race for supremacy among the American filmmakers who achieved big-deal status during the 1990s, here's how things stand as this year winds down: with Quentin Tarantino providing the half of a double feature that followed the half that much of the audience walked out on, Richard Linklater taking a well-deserved breather, David O. Russell becoming a reality star on YouTube, Alexander Payne ducking through corners in a Groucho mask to avoid explaining his screenwriting credit on I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, and Kevin Smith unable to make a long-term thing out of his job directing the pilot for the TV show about an underachieving minimum-wage ape with a secret life battling dark forces that isn't Chuck. We extend wishes of good luck and productivity in the year to come to all of them, except maybe for Kevin Smith. In the meantime, with less than a week of 2007 left to go, Paul Thomas Anderson has vaulted into first place with his first movie in five years, There Will Be Blood. Opening today, Anderson's period epic, starring Daniel Day Lewis as an obsessive, misanthropic prospector, is making a scramble for becoming the best-reviewed movie of the year.
This was not an altogether predictable development. In a thoughtful piece on where Anderson has been so far and where he's at now, Dennis Lim describes Anderson as a thirty-seven-year-old "enfant terrible" who "incites strong, divided opinions." "Strong, divided opinions" may seem to be a soft way of putting it for anyone who went through the great Magnolia wars of 1999. In that high-pitched, three-hour film, which had the feel of an attempted career summation despite its only being the director's third movie, Anderson delivered a titanic audience-divider, just in time for the end of the millennium. Since it came out, the movie has gradually acquired more and more supporters who tend to regard it not just admiringly but downright protectively, but at the time of its release, the roars of derision were deafening. To a great degree, Magnolia was not criticized as a disappointment or an honest failure but as some sort of violation of aesthetic law whose creator ought to be stripped of his epaulets and driven into the Forbidden Zone. For a self-taught filmmaker who wasn't yet thirty, dealing with that must have been an interesting experience. The bonus-features disc on the Magnolia DVD includes a little home movie in which Anderson's then-girlfriend, Fiona Apple, apparently playing the movie, performs an interpretive dance while Anderson hisses, "Boogie Nights made money! You want to be the only one that doesn't...It's too fucking long, there's too many blow-ups--it's all just too fucking too!"
As Lim points out, Anderson is indeed "a size freak", but he also "invites emotional responses because he's an emotional filmmaker, and this, too, distinguishes him from most of his cohorts. The signature trait of the '90s indie school is detachment, whether in the form of self-conscious cleverness or numb ennui, but there's nothing detached about Anderson's films...Given the dominant American pop idioms of snark and quirk, Anderson's sensibility can be confounding. He's satirical, but also achingly sincere. His characters often speak with a declarative directness that is both breathtaking and a little ridiculous." Those viewers not swept up in Magnolia's emotional flow seem to have responded to its steady stream of heartfelt monologues by desperately unhappy people desperate to connect (to the people onscreen and to the people in the audience) as proof that they were at the mercy of a high-school amateur. In his follow-up to Magnolia, the Adam Sandler movie Punch-Drunk Love, Anderson sensibly scaled down and tightened the focus on a single character, but the picture was still huge in the audacity of its approach. Anderson is as much a cerebral movie geek as any of his contemporaries, but he's probably the only one of them who might have taken a look at Adam Sandler's screen image and actually thought about it on an emotional level, dissecting it and exploring what it might be like to live at such an unstable level of passive-aggressiveness. The movie was still direct in its emotional current but more atylized, with a central character nowhere near as articulate as those in Magnolia. (The movie was much better received critically than Magnolia but it didn't do much business; the publicity department failed to rise to the challenge of somehow alerting people that this was an Adam Sandler movie for people who can't stand Adam Sandler.)
With his fifth film, Anderson may have found a story that enables him to indulge his taste for spectacle and vast canvasses while presenting a conventional enough surface to appease the likes of The New Yorker's David Denby, who dismissed both Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love as "whimsical". (Denby likes There Will Be Blood, except for the conclusion, which he figures proves that "some part of him must have rebelled against canonization." I must have been dozing when we all agreed to put Jughead in charge of the canon.) For the moment, for some of us, the price of Anderson's surprise success may be having to listen to some people use his new movie as a club to beat on his earlier work. But we'll settle so long as he doesn't get in the habit of making us wait five years between movies.