False Promises and Indiana Jones

Steven Spielberg’s most blockbustery films have always wed big-budget commerciality to some stream of deeper issues running beneath the narrative’s surface—the collapse of childhood in ET, the psychology of fear in Jaws, and most importantly, the danger of cloned dinosaurs running amok on a Costa Rican island in Jurassic Park. But take away either the commerciality (as in Amistad, or A.I.) or the depth (as in 1941) and you’re left with an unsettlingly mediocre experience, and that's just what you get with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Midway through its first act, our eponymous hero, having just been launched a preposterous distance by the force of an atomic blast (in a 50s-era refrigerator—but at least it’s lead-lined, so we know this is all totally plausible), scampers up an embankment to survey the oblivion. Lurching into frame, Indiana is dwarfed completely by the iconic mushroom cloud billowing heavenwards. It’s the first of many hints that Indy has aged into a world beyond him, a world in which the miracle of the split atom is every bit as important as the miracles of the Lost Ark or the Holy Grail. In a literal flash, everything that defined Indiana Jones over the past three decades seemingly disappears: once a fierce detractor of the US government, Jones has become an OSS agent in the intervening years; a lone wolf defined by his transient relationships, Indy somehow picked up a steady sidekick in the War.

It’s a promising proposition: rarely (if ever) is an audience given the perspective of enough time to watch a character—much less a cultural icon—evolve into something completely different, whether by conscious decision making or by fading away into obsolescence. But that potential payoff quickly disappears, as we’re quickly reminded that, while our own reality is suffused with vicissitudes both bitter and sweet, movie heroes suffer no such indignities. At a stroke, Spielberg undermines whatever deeper currents may have been at work for Crystal Skull. “We’re at an age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away,” Indiana opines to an old friend, just after receiving news of his dismissal, but neither he nor Spielberg ever really mean it. Indiana hasn’t lost his breezy self-confidence or his superior physical skills: he’s able to crack wise and crack skulls with the same old aplomb, and all the while careening down a narrow dirt lane in a Brazilian rainforest to boot. And as for that whole life-taketh-away thing? By film’s end, Indiana ends up with a family without even trying.

At the climax, Indiana once again surveys a scene of spectacular destruction, as a spaceship twirls with enough force to destroy an ancient temple and divert the mighty Amazon from its course. It’s the perfect inverse bookend to the mushroom cloud shot earlier on. Indiana is master of this domain. He has engineered these events, and he watches not from below but from above. He is no longer a solitary figure defined against the grandeur in the distance; He is the Almighty observing his creation. He is Zeus on Olympus. He alone knows what it all means, and he alone knows where it’s all going, as the promise of a fallible American hero once again circles the drain.

Maybe next time.

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There Will Be Boredom

Sometimes the crush of rave reviews is so overwhelming that you just have to attend that play, or listen to that album, or buy that book, even if it you normally wouldn’t. To that end I finally succumbed to There Will Be Blood, the newest film by Paul Thomas Anderson, which is currently tracking sky-high on both Metacritic and RottenTomatoes. Anderson, who made his mark with the torpid Boogie Nights, has always received such generous praise that it brings to mind the famous maxim by that other PT, to the effect that there’s a sucker born every minute. But what’s ten bucks and a couple hours if the payoff is a great film?

That’s a question that I can’t answer. There Will Be Blood is not a great film. It’s not a good film, either. It’s a mess. Certainly it has some dazzling moments, but those moments are so few that their aggregate effect can’t possibly lift the movie above its mediocrity.

The story of There Will Be Blood, to the extent there is one, is based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, wherein a brooding, resentful oilman makes a small fortune, then makes a bigger one at the turn of the 20^th Century when he starts drilling in a remote California hamlet. At the end of his life, he sits, unshaven and alone, in his stately pleasure dome, having alienated all his friends and family in the ribald quest for wealth.

But all that is ancillary to the main thrust of There Will Be Blood, which, like Anderson’s other films, is less concerned with story than with its characters. How they interact. How they change (or how they don’t). That’s a perfectly fine narrative device, provided you have a stable of interesting personalities to play with. Here, though, aside from Daniel Day-Lewis’s rapacious oilman and Paul Dano as his preacher-foil, the characters are paper-thin. Day-Lewis’s son is little more than a wide-eyed afterthought, who speaks so little that even when he becomes deaf-mute, the change is scarcely noticeable. There’s also a long-lost brother that gets shoehorned into the movie halfway in, who doesn’t add anything to the movie except minutes to its runtime.

What you get, then, is a universe where everyone and everything exist simply to be subsumed by the oilman. Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview as such an inexorable storm that his apotheosis is all but inevitable. Given the movie’s source material, perhaps that’s unsurprising. Upton Sinclair has never been known for his narrative subtlety, preferring to denounce the greed of the status quo rather than offer deep introspection, and that sentiment pervades There Will Be Blood. As Day-Lewis grows richer, he abandons his son, destroys the village identity, and undermines Dano’s religious conviction. For Anderson (and Sinclair), black oil always stains more than clothes.


But it’s hard to care. His son is a cipher. The village is nondescript. And while the film’s most magical moments, the scenes between Dano and Day-Lewis, crackle with an energy that leave one wondering what a great experience There Will Be Blood could have been, they are inexplicably abandoned for great lengths of time. Instead, we get to see Daniel Plainview act predictably, as the corruptive forces of money blah blah blah. We get it. Robber barons are bad. Money is pernicious. It’s been done before, and done better.

We’re coming up on 100 years of cinema, yet some still haven’t grasped that a novel and film are separate beasts. A novel will engross you for weeks and so can incorporate many themes, issues, characters; a cinematized novel at 2 hours will necessarily suffer if it is trying to replicate its source material perfectly. Anderson tries to do that here, and the result is that there are so many half-explored themes and unessential characters it feels like a product of a freshman film class.

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