Now that Daniel Day-Lewis has been anointed the overwhelming front-runner for Best Actor honors on Sunday night, some members of the criterati have decided to rain on his parade before it even gets started. Leading the charge is Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, making the seemingly counterintuitive argument "Too Great to Be Good." Zacharek makes it clear that, while audiences, critics and Academy voters may have fallen for Day-Lewis's obsessed oilman, she feels the actor is peddling nothing but snake oil. "Day-Lewis doesn't so much give a performance as offer a character design, an all-American totem painstakingly whittled from a twisted piece of wood," she writes. "The tragedy of Day-Lewis' performance in There Will Be Blood is that it defies the naturalism that made him a great actor — and I use the word ‘great' unequivocally — in the first place, as if he'd decided that naturalism is boring, that it no longer presents a challenge for him."
The debate continues over at MSN Movies, with Jim Emerson coming down more or less on Zacharek's side. Day-Lewis's performance, he says, "consists of the application and accumulation of effects — strips of newspaper, gobs of flour paste, buckets of paint, and bits of tinfoil, carefully layered onto an inflated balloon to make a big fat piñata. Only somebody forgot to stuff it." Kathleen Murphy is having none of it, describing the actor's turn as "authentically terrifying, a radical evocation of an American Aguirre: The Wrath of God. The actor seems to be possessed by Daniel Plainview — as he clearly was by Christy Brown in My Left Foot, for whom he literally sacrificed all physical grace in order to fully inhabit a broken body. . . This takes courage, or a kind of madness, a willingness to act out on the grand scale."
For the record, put me down on Murphy's side of the argument; larger-than-life characters call for larger-than-life performances — Orson Welles wasn't particularly "naturalistic" in Citizen Kane, and there's no reason he should have been. To his credit, Emerson is not necessarily opposed to Big Acting or over-the-top performances, as he notes on his own Scanners blog. "Performances pitched at the balcony, or the moon, always take the risk of falling somewhere between ‘tour-de-force' and ‘trying way too hard,' virtuosity and showboating. And opinions may vary about where they come down." Clearly that's the case, but there's no need to fight about it. Let's all share a milkshake, shall we?
