(For a little balance, and to refresh your belief in progress, try AC Grayling’s criticisms.)

gaffr blog - retrospective

Day-Lewis is easy to criticise because he is so far beyond the abilities of just about every other actor making a living in the movies. Every one of his films is a must-see simply because each one of his performances is entirely compelling. And especially so Daniel Plainview, the silver prospector turned oilman in There Will Be Blood. The entire film is about him, and that it is billed as an epic, takes place across decades of time and every shot is a giant historic panorama only serves to underline the enormity of this man’s talent.

The best aspect of the film is what we don’t know about Plainview. What we do know about him we know immediately from the silent opening: the hazardous solitary work in grim mines, the injuries and determination, the wordless acceptance of the struggle of life. And this grim determination grows throughout the film, it’s his calling card, it’s why he becomes so malignantly successful. But what we never really understand about him is the best part of Day-Lewis’ subtle performance. It is the battle with the religious fervour of Eli Sunday, from the initial refusal to join hands in prayer, through beating him up in a seeming revenge attack for the injuries to Plainview’s adopted son, to the final bloody confrontation that adds such a depth to the character. A facile filmmaker might have contrived a source for this anger; Paul Thomas Anderson leaves it to the towering abilities of his leading actor to create a truly complicated human subject.

But the contradictions implode at the end, out of all proportion; the millionaire languishing in a lonely mansion until fateful visits from both his adopted son and then his preacher adversary push the subtlety aside. The madness, the slight quirkiness and determination of Plainview explode in apparent overacting, and there’s blood, “milkshake” and an Oscar.

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Instead, If This Is A Man is free of all sentimentalism, and does not turn away from describing the full horror of a work camp within Auschwitz in clear and calm prose. There is no self-pity, or a defining moment that makes a man determined to survive; there is no place in the memoir where it is the heroic character of the narrator that leads to his final freedom. This is a simple and honest account of what happened to an Italian Jew when he was transported to Auschwitz.

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Alan Bennett directs these words at Kafka from the character of Max Brod (Kafka’s best friend and executor) in his play Kafka’s Dick. There is no doubting Kafka’s position as one of the greatest writers of modernity, but the writer and man himself tends to be hidden in the shadow of this reputation, or, more often perhaps, confused with the main characters in his stories and novels. The story of his life may be quite well known to readers of Kafka through the publication of his diaries and voluminous correspondence with the women he was often engaged to, but it is to rescue Kafka from the simplifications of the adjective Kafkaesque that Murray has written this new biography.

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Koestler is describing the impact of the Copernican revolution in the sixteenth century, comparing it to changes in belief that spread through Western society from the work of other writers, such as Darwin and Marx. The terminology is eerily memetic, yet his real concern is to show how established ideas (in this case the Ptolemaic belief that the sun revolves around the earth) hold sway over thinkers until there is a sudden break with the past, and a completely new belief system becomes accepted. The process of scientific advance he describes is very similar to the paradigm shift, introduced by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (published within a few years of The Sleepwalkers), and now a familiar term. Both writers are trying to show that science does not move forward in a gradual advance of knowledge, but in fact jumps forward and sometimes sideways in leaps and gear shifts.

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