The score is at fault here too. I heard a lot of hype about how unconventional and effective it is, but it sounds fairly straightforward to me. There’s no anachronistic elements, nothing that jumps out at you, it’s just dissonant, buzzing strings and other similar sounds. It’s nothing like Jon Brion’s Magnolia or Punch Drunk Love scores, which provide momentum and additional aesthetic beauty to those films.

I’d suspect Anderson wanted to go minimalistic for this film, to prove that he could make films without “gimmicks.” But is Malick a gimmicky filmmaker? Is Wong Kar-Wai a gimmicky filmmaker? Those are the guys that Anderson matched up to in his past two films, creating these emotionally immersive, wonder-filled epics. Here, he’s making a much more straight ahead film, and it really bothers me that people are calling it more “mature” or a major leap forward. This is exemplary of a bias in film criticism which holds that movies set in the past are somehow inherently more worthy than present day stuff. This movie doesn’t feel alive in the way that his others do; unfortunately, mature is frequently a euphemism for more conventional. But, as Alan Moore said, reality is much less interesting than fantasy, and the lack of stylistic flourishes hurts the film for me.

My guess is that Anderson felt Day-Lewis would provide the film with all it needed, and his goal as a filmmaker was to just stay out of the way and let Lewis do his thing. Unfortunately, Day Lewis, in my opinion, is not a very good actor. Now, that may be blasphemy to some, so let me explain. For me, acting should be about becoming a character. The best performances are the ones that don’t feel like performances at all, where you assume they just found this guy on the street and put him in the film. However, critics and awards organizations don’t usually award those performances because they’re not showy, if a person seems just like the character they’re playing, it means they’re not acting right? That’s probably why The Wire hasn’t got any acting awards.

Anyway, Day-Lewis is a frequently awarded actor, and has this mythology about his total commitment to every role. This is the guy who sat in a wheelchair for three months for My Left Foot, lived in the forest for a year killing deer for Last of the Mohicans, and apparently he actually took a time machine and lived in 1911 for this role. That’s devotion, right? But, it’s this very devotion to the role that distances me from his work. He always seems to be so intensely into the role, I think more this guy is acting up a storm than just looking at Plainview and thinking, huh, this is a troubled, nasty guy. The performance itself becomes a kind of spectacle, the intensity is so powerful that critics mistake that for good acting. But, to me, the intensity is such that I’m taken out of the film, it’s an extra-textual intensity, not motivated by what’s in the film. I never get the sense of Plainview as a human being. Day-Lewis may stay in character all the time on set, but no one in real life stays in character all the time. We shift and change depending on the situation, and I didn’t feel that capacity for varied emotion from the character.