Young at art ... Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
As the new year grinds into life, a sizeable chunk of the blogosphere is still devoted above all else to the myriad wonders of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (still frustratingly a month from its British release). For those of us who fell for Anderson early on in his career, it's been gratifying seeing him no longer talked about as a purveyor of what Michael Atkinson at Zero for Conduct recently called "self-infatuated [and] pointless epic-ness" (he's wrong, but that's another post), to being recognised for what he's always been - the real thing. Indeed, he's even receiving the accolade of a full-blown career retrospective at New York's Museum of the Moving Image, taking place this weekend.
Detailed by The Reeler, Anderson's season is to be followed by a similar event across the city in honour of another young-ish buck, the gifted Thai film-maker Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul - born within a few weeks of Anderson, with both still two years shy of 40. As the blog suggests, it seems somehow noteworthy that the pair should be claiming quite such a degree of reverence at such a relatively young age. On closer examination, however, what's weird is that age should even be an issue, both with Anderson in particular, and as a general principle.
Though Anderson was frequently portrayed as an apple-cheeked prodigy at the time of his 1996 debut Hard Eight, his youth turned into a stick to beat him with after Magnolia, his freewheeling, three hour tableau of life in the San Fernando Valley. As a critique, it made no sense then, and it makes no sense now. If the defining trait of being young is the inability to see beyond the end of your own adolescent frustrations, Magnolia was one vast, rolling ball of empathy - at its very centre lay a terrifying portrait of old age delivered by a flawless Jason Robards. Equally, even if you bought the idea of Anderson's frog-raining, sing-a-long opus as sprawling, incoherent and excessively grandiose, then that kind of folly is hardly the preserve of the young. After all, if Oliver Stone were a Londoner, he'd be travelling free on the buses by now.
Yet the perception of brattishness clung to Anderson, just as conventional wisdom now holds up There Will Be Blood as proof of his maturing into filmic adulthood. It is, of course, nonsense - a product of a cultural chestnut which has it that anything made by a young director has to be an exercise in callow navel-gazing. To me, that's a notion which seems an inappropriate overspill from our ideal of novelists rather than film-makers - where the basic template remains the wizened village elder - but whatever its merits in the literary world, it simply doesn't hold up in cinema. Look at the career trajectories of Coppola or (though I hate to say it) Scorsese, or the fact that Citizen Kane, Badlands, She's Gotta Have It and most of Buster Keaton's movies were all made by people under 30.
Another ex-wünderkind has also been claiming blog attention of late: Gregg Araki, onetime hero of micro-budget indiedom. His strange, circuitous career path has now taken in (of all things) a female-centric stoner comedy called Smiley Face. It's some way from the joys of Dude, Where's My Car, with Vadim Rizov at The House Next Door pointing out that "a rare copy of the Communist Manifesto drives a lot of the plot," before describing the result as both "consistently engaging and occasionally hilarious" and "the most depressing comedy of the year."
It's pleasing to see continued activity from Araki, a director whose early work back in the distant nineties I loathed with a vengeance, but whose Mysterious Skin upended my every mean-spirited expectation in 2005 and became one of my favourite films of the year. But I'm also glad for zoned-out female lead Anna Faris - previously the best thing in Lost in Translation, and a comic actress so talented it's tempting to think of her as Leslie Nielsen re-born as a wide-eyed early 30s blonde. And on that only slightly disturbing note ...
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