The Bon Vivant of Brooklyn

There Will Be OSCARS.  Oh yes, there will be Oscars.

Paul Thomas Anderson may not be the most prolific auteur in Hollywood, but he is without a doubt the most consistently brilliant.  It's been five years since Punch Drunk Love, and it's been eight years since Magnolia, but it has surely been worth the wait, because this film is his Citizen Kane.  It is an epic tragedy of ambition that pulls whole cloth from Shakespeare's MacBeth and any number of depressing Greek sagas, but weaves the tale with an originality that is rarely found these days.  He has honestly made Ang Lee and Brokeback Mountain look pathetic in comparison (okay, well, that's a romantic tragedy, but you get my drift).

Daniel Day-Lewis delivers one of the most compelling performances I have seen in a very, very, very long time.  If he does not win Best Actor this year, it will be absolutely criminal.  And his genius is all in the details:  the nuance of his facial expressions, the gesture of a limp that stays with the character throughout his life, and the perfect inflection of his voice reflecting exactly what his character is thinking at that exact moment.

Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine, L.I.E.) has an inspired performance himself as the adversarial town preacher, but somehow it feels like the casting choice was slighty off.  He cannot compete at all with the monumental Day-Lewis, and thus his frenetic and fanatic character comes off a bit more childish than it should, despite his valiant attempts at religious fervor.  Dano is simply a young flower wilting in the shadow of the mature oak tree that is Daniel Day-Lewis, who is at his peak powers playing the wildcat oil man who runs along the razor's edge of madness.

And Anderson is also scaling and topping his own creative heights.  His director's vision is uncanny, and the images he captures in the film border on supernaturally beautiful.  I'm thinking in particular of the way he exhibits the harsh desert landscapes; the portrayal of the rough mechanisms of turn-of-the-century industry - churning derricks, wooden rigging, rusting metal, men as cogs in the unstoppable machine of progress; and even a peaceful moment of blue sky and fluffy clouds reflected in the shiny yet abyssal blackness of a pool of crude oil.  The tension in the film is unrelenting without being dissatisfying, and the original score by Jonny Greenwood (lead guitarist of Radiohead) masterfully plays out this coil of suspense, winding and unwinding it throughout, complementing the pure insanity that drips out of Daniel Day-Lewis at all the right moments.

Kudos to Paramount Vantage and Miramax for blowing this incredible breath of fresh air back into cinema.  Paramount Vantage is having a banner year with the release of No Country For Old Men, Margot at the Wedding, and Into The Wild - but this masterpiece is the tastiest icing on that cake that I can imagine.  Well done, and may you win the awards you richly deserve!

(Gawker-style note:  I had a brief celebrity sighting of Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal arm in arm at the concession stand, and thought "OMG how cool" in my inimitable not-yet-used-to-seeing-celebrities-in-real-life style.)