Reviews

A vision of the psychological extremes that unrequited erotic obsessions can create, L'IMBALSAMATORE has a deceptively placid surface.

Peppino, a dwarfish, homely-looking taxidermist with horrible teeth, takes an interest in Valerio, a gorgeous young man who is biding his time unproductively as a food runner in a cheap restaurant. Peppino takes Valerio on as assistant, even though he can't really afford it, and Valerio is overwhelmed with gratitude for the mentorship. But Peppino's attitude soon begins to take on uncomfortably sexual and possessive overtones, that everyone except Valerio sees - at first.

L'IMBALSAMATORE has an opaque atmosphere of unease. Like THE VANISHING, much of it is shot in cheerful, sunny daylight, and there is plenty of light-hearted humor; like MONSIEUR HIRE, you can't be sure if what seems creepy is your own prejudice or a genuine malice.

Matteo Garrone builds the erotic tension to an almost unbearable intensity. This is an audacious picture that plays with perception and memory; we can never be sure if what we are seeing is really happening, or occurring only in Peppino's twisted fantasies, or in Valerio's bewildered daydreams. Reality and fantasy blur. L'IMBALSAMATORE is feverish and spellbinding.

"Turn-of-the-century" is not a phrase you hear any more; that's because, 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, people were still using it to refer to the period of the late 1800s and early 1900s, a quaint period where things like long-distance radio, women competing in the Olympics and the internal combustion engine (the main component of new novelties like the automobile and the airplane) were just dipping a toe in the ocean of their impact on human society.

But now in 2008, nobody's using that phrase anymore – because of course, the century has turned once again, and the bemused wisdom of hindsight that "turn-of-the-century" once implied has become uncomfortable – because we are now in a future we are too busy and stressed out to appreciate or absorb. What new inventions, just being introduced, might radically change our lives and world in the years to come? Please – we're still trying to deal with 5 minutes ago.

There Will Be Blood is set in this period of yestercentury, opening in 1898. The film tracks for almost the next 30 years, a visionary oilman who lives the before, during and after of the tipping point when petroleum took over coal's mantle as the primary source of energy the world depended upon. This is a bracing film, buoyed by a mad, intense star performance by the great Irish actor Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, the oilman.

There Will Be Blood experiments with picture and sound in exhilarating ways. The first 16 minutes of the film contain not one word of dialogue, a rare way to start an American movie. The compositions and edits don't telegraph what we're supposed to be absorbing – the details exist quietly, in the larger mis-en-scene, and the pictures magnetize our concentration. Here's a film that asks us to pursue it, rather than vice-versa. For a film that largely takes place in 1911, it feels very much like film-making more sophisticated than what we are used to in 2008. Lighting is frequently dark. Characters sit at opposite ends of the frame, with vast, empty (yet pungent) expanses between them in the center of the shot. The art direction, costumes and cinematography capture the grime and quiet we are used to seeing in photos of the period, so effectively it's spooky.

The narrative pounds forward. Plainview experiments with early drilling techniques and uses trial, error and his own unstoppable gumption to get petroleum out from below the ground and into the hands of the big refining companies, racing against seemingly only himself in the insistence upon increasing the profit margin. A pivotal moment comes when Plainview is propositioned by a strange boy, Paul Sunday, who sells out the simple California family he abandoned for only $500. Sick over the freight costs he must pay the railways to ship his oil to the California refineries, Plainview heads west to exploit those whom the young Sunday has promised do not know. A musical score such as we've never heard before in the movies, written by a composer who has never before scored a fiction feature (Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood), keeps us on edge – fast-moving dissonant trills punctuated by foreboding, low-lying percussion.

Unexpectedly, while expenses go down (the rural Californians of the fictional Little Boston ignorantly sell their land to Plainview on the cheap) the overhead only increases. Plainview has no family, but by his side is a 10-year-old boy he tells everyone (including the boy) is his son – but more importantly, his "business partner". (The boy, whom he calls H.W., actually belonged to a fellow miner who died in a tragic accident in one of Plainview's earlier mining experiments, whose wife had died in childbirth, and Plainview grabbed the opportunity to effectively impersonate the child's father.) H.W. becomes a victim in another mining accident, suffering a major handicap – and Plainview loses his "business partner". (The boy's sweet, serious face was a major bonus in sucking signatures out of goat farmers and their wives.) Paul Sunday's younger brother Eli surfaces – and is the first individual that can rival Plainview in his drive and fever to conquer his fellow man (although Eli's vehicle of choice is radical evangelism, not capitalism) – and Plainview must invest in destroying him. The bloodthirsty immortality mounts – and the pendulum inevitability swings back, as impersonation (in a different form) and humiliation come home to roost.

What's happening to our world? There Will Be Blood is one the year's most brilliant films; it is completely about right now, and the teeming world on the brink of technological changes that will change our lives as we hurl forward into the future. Will we learn compassion and grace, check our growing greed and egos against a moral compass? There Will Be Blood has the audacity to flat out state that we won't. It's chilling – and claustrophobic. It invokes a fight-or-flight instinct – but the end of the film, where we are confined with our hero in a small room that mirrors the small dark mine in which we started this journey 29 years and 155 minutes earlier, we realize that there's no where to run to in this society – and that we will need nothing less than a superwoman to save us. Now.

Poor Billy Crudup. This graciously natural actor is stuck in a miserable role in Big Fish, playing William Bloom, the stick-in-the-mud son of a very ordinary man named Edward Bloom, who has enchantedly imagined his entire life as a gloriously giddy myth. But William, who grew up to be a newspaper reporter (he specializes in facts!), can't accept his dad for who he is. And so while Edward spins wonderful gold out of the straw of his life, William the wimp rejects him totally until Edward begins to die, when William comes home to America from Europe, with his French wife. What for? To grill Edward for the "truth". What a jerk!

Nobody who goes to see Big Fish is going to like William. So it's unfortunate the whole movie is set up with William as the hero - he's the one who's going to grow and change, he's the one we are going to wait for the whole film until he catches up with what we already know from scene one: he's got a wonderful dad. No matter how talented of an actor Billy Crudup is, every time he's on screen in Big Fish you just want him to shut up and get lost. William is a loser.

His father Edward is a champion yarn spinner. But the character we actually love most in Big Fish is Edward's wife Sandy, because Sandy loves Edward for who he is and can follow with her heart what her eye cannot see. Now that's extraordinary vision! Unfortunately for Big Fish, Sandy doesn't get as much screen or story time as putzy William, and the movie suffers, because the two best scenes - involving the young Sandy (Alison Lohman) crumpled on the front lawn of her home when she thinks Edward's been killed in the Korean War, and the older Sandy (Jessica Lange) climbing fully clothed into a bathtub with Edward - are all we have to hang our hearts on in this movie.

There's several surface treats, fueled by Tim Burton's fanciful eye and Phillipe Rousselot's quirky and handsome photography, but they don't have a strong rallying point - which should have been the love bond between Edward and Sandy. But Big Fish ultimately misses the boat as well as the golden ring it symbolically tries to swallow in the first scene.