Locked-in lost souls

By Tom Shone

Paul Thomas Anderson has the same condition that afflicted the late Stanley Kubrick: an inability to summon his energies for anything less than a masterpiece. There's nothing like aiming high, of course, as long as you get enough oxygen. The learned journal Sight & Sound recently sent the film world into convulsions when it announced that "Citizen Kane", long voted the best film of all time in its critics' poll, had finally been ousted by Hitchcock's "Vertigo". Personally, I've always preferred the arterial pulse of Welles's "Touch of Evil" to the cold marvel that is "Kane", and while I'm as waylaid as the next man by the woozy melancholy of "Vertigo", isn't it the Hitchcock picture for those who secretly wish that Hitchcock had been French?

Movies are too collaborative a medium to submit to one man's mastery. "On the Waterfront" resulted from the unrepeatable jolt delivered by Kazan, Brando and Budd Schulberg; "Chinatown" from the three-way galvanism of Polanski, Nicholson and Robert Towne. By contrast, Anderson's recent work has shown the unyielding brilliance of a younger director bending the entire medium to his will. This is his subject—human will, as seen in the tendon-taut figure of Daniel Day-Lewis in "There Will Be Blood" (2007). That was not so much an American masterpiece as a film in the genre of an American masterpiece: a study of a flawed tycoon, a Kane, a Corleone, that was as monomaniac as its subject.