I should probably wait to finish watching the damn movie, but I’m asking anyway, while it’s fresh in my mind.
I’ve watched to the point where Eli beats up his father after Daniel beats HIM up, and watching to that point answered one question I had: are Paul and Eli twins or is Eli some kind of nutcase? Evidently they are twins, judging from the angry words Eli was spewing at his father.
My question is: why the hell did Daniel beat him up? Did he just randomly decided to take his anger about his son’s injury out on Eli because Eli is a smug little shit from the outset, or was there some other, more directly related reason? Am I supposed to be confused right now?
Was the beating before or after the big scene in the church? I’ve seen the whole movie once, and bits and pieces here and there, so the timeline’s all mixed up in my head. I thought the beating was because of what Eli did to Daniel in the church, and maybe a teensy bit of Daniel needing a scapegoat for his son’s deafness.
I don’t think you’ve missed anything. Some of Daniel’s actions will only make sense to Daniel.
I have a question for you when you’re finished watching. I know you say spoil freely, but my question is too much of a spoiler. I wouldn’t have wanted to know in advance.
Daniel is a complete cunt, and Eli is standing in his way by using lies and deceit in the best tradition of clerics everywhere to stop Daniel from doing what he wants to do… and Daniel knows that Eli knows that everything he says about God is total, utter crap.
But he can’t actually trump that crap, and so his frustration finally, temporarily, boils over.
Basically Daniel and Eli are both scammers. Daniel scams people out of their land for his own profit, and Eli scams people spiritually for his own personal glory. They both move along merrily through life until the day they meet each other.
The problem is that Daniel and Eli see right through one another. Daniel has the shorter fuse, and ends up dragging Eli through the mud.
They’re twins. It’s not a split personality thing. When Plainview and H.W. first meet Eli out on the ranch, H.W. shoots a look at Plainview - which is supposed to communicate “twins, huh?”
Eli is scamming for profit too. Money for a church to get more followers to get more money. And then he leaves on a “mission trip” to the city. The next time we see him he had accumulated (and lost) great wealth. I make the safe assumption that he never returned to his jerkwater town and kept right at making his fortune off of religious types. Though he does mention the Sunday boy, but he says he wants to be in movies, which could imply that the boy went to Eli, not the other way around.
Was Daniel lying when he told his son that he wasn’t his real son, that he was basically a foundling child of an unnamed whore?
I think Daniel really loved the kid, was hurt when he didn’t follow in his footsteps, and that he thought that telling him “You’re not my son” was a reaction to the hurt. I don’t see Daniel loving a kid that isn’t his.
But if the kid really isn’t his, that adds another aspect to Daniel’s character, that he’s capable of love, and capable of being hurt.
Despite the general ugliness of Daniel’s character, I really liked the movie. Daniel Day Lewis was outstanding, and the film looked great – wonderful cinematography and set design. I can rewatch everything except the ending. That was just too intense.
I think he did love the child, but the general consensus seems to be that he took him on as a prop initially…sweetface to sell himself to the people he was buying land from.
I think it was a masterful performance… I can’t think of a day-lewis performance that isn’t, but I’m not sure what to think about the film as a whole. If it was made to showcase DDL, then it did the job. BUt for what other purpose? What was the greater story, meaning, intention? This character was a warped, broken sick bastard…what does PTA want us to glean from that?
I am a PTA fan, I must say, Boogie Nights is solidly ensconced in my Top Ten Films I’ll Watch Every Single Time. I think I must have seen it 15 times by now. LOVE that movie. I think I’ll start a thread about it…
The most talked about films of last year, this and No Country For Old Men both left me feeling the same way: why did I just watch that?
Excellent acting, great cinematography, amazing audio tracks, nice sets, costumes, all the details are done perfectly… except that ultimately, there really is no story, no message, nothing greater than the opportunity to watch 2 enormously hideous people do terrible things.
I own both films, and have watched each a couple of times, mostly to just see if my first impression would be changed, and I doubt I’ll ever watch either again. 2x FAIL in my book.
Incidentally: my two-year old has never seen this film, but somewhere she learned that it’s funny to look at me from across the table and yell “I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!”
No Country for Old Men… yeah, I think it’s a fair comparison. Although I think NCFOM is more stylish and has a sense of humor lurking in its dark heart, which TWBB does not. (The Cohen brothers are not capable of deleting all humor from their filmmaking, no matter how vile the subject or characters.) Javier Bardem did a fantastic job… then again, half his performance was the fucking creepy hair.
I have to say, I can’t recall ever in my life being more tense than during the liquor store scene at the beginning, I had to stop the DVD, take a break and do something else for awhile.
Both movies work as character studies, don’t you think? No Country for Old Men seemed more traditional – there was a plot to be followed. In Blood, we watched Daniel become successful and self-destruct, but there wasn’t much of a plot, unless we count the fake brother as a plot.
It’s about America – specifically, about the battle to control American between the opposing forces of religion and capitalism. Each force is both creative and destructive. Each force is ultimately a cynical con, but each also starts with – and eventually loses – some semblance of a soul. Before it’s over, each gets the other to admit the truth about itself. Ultimately, religion tries to sell out to capitalism, but by then it’s too late. Capitalism has already stolen anything religion had to offer. Capitalism murders religion. Both are finished.
I’m not entirely sure what HW symbolizes, but I think that, in part, he represents Daniel’s only tenuous connection to his own humanity, and I think it’s significant that Daniel loses the ability to communicate with this part of himself. HW can literally, no longer hear him.
