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May 7, 2005

I love English literature. I love the films of Paul Thomas Anderson. So when it was speculated last month that Anderson had adapted Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil! and had cast Daniel Day Lewis in the lead role - well, that was enough to get me to pick up the book and give it a read. I'd always meant to read Sinclair's The Jungle, but this was as good a starting place as any.

Now, having finished it, I thought I'd speculate further - but first, a short review of the book itself.

The novel is a marvelous read, mixing World history and American politics with a classical father-son melodrama. The lead character is young Bunny Ross, a would-be-playboy who loves his oil magnate father but is torn between familial duty and feelings that the oil business is corrupt and exploitative of the labor force which keeps it running. Sinclair has written the book in an overly enthusiastic, almost naive vernacular, ending practically every third sentence with an exlamation point and maintaining an eager, attentive perspective on the inner workings of the oil business and his characters alike. His prose is full of technical details and cheekily complex syntax, but is so breezy that the 527 pages he fills with it practically fly by.

Particularly interesting are the parallels to today's government - inadvertent ones, of course, which Sinclar surely would be chagrined to discover are all too obvious. A running theme of the novel deals with Bunny's feelings about the Bolshevik uprising in Russia; that, and whether or not the American government had just cause to maintain its presence in Siberia following World War II. Sound familiar? How about this sentence from near the end of the book: "It became clear to him: the purchase of the government was necessary if big business in America was to survive."

While Sinclair was an open socialist, the novel is not overt propaganda (save for the last fifteen pages or so). While he does condemn big business and a Republican government, and lampoons Evangelical Christianity, and criticizes various social and sexual mores of the time - it's most certainly a 'blue' novel - his intent is to raise valid ideas and important questions, rather than enforce any sort of dogma. Like Hugo's Les Miserables, perhaps (which this reminded me of, ever so slightly), the social concerns of the author and the story do not supersede the story itself, which, in a very Capra-esque manner, remains compelling and effective. As a progressive son who maintains a thoughtful and meaningful relationship with his conservative parents, I found Bunny's dialogues with his father particularly appealing - their attempts to try and understand each other felt very close to home.

So, what might we expect Paul Thomas Anderson to make of this?

First of all, it's set in Southern California, which means he'll be right at home. And like that locale, the father-and-son element so prevalent in the story is something that's been central to all of his movies, save for Punch Drunk Love; love, conflict and forgiveness of the paternal sort has rarely been portrayed as well as it was in Hard Eight and Magnolia. Furthermore, PTA has suggested in interviews that he's quite the bleeding heart Democrat, and Sinclair's politics - and certainly what has turned out to be a very allegorical prescience - must have appealed to him. Politics have definitely been on his mind - it was reported last summer that he was writing a part in an unspecified screenplay for California State Senate President John Burton. There are quite a handful of roles he might fill in this story.

All that having been said, I sincerely doubt that PTA's script is a slavish adaptation - all signs point away from that option. Consider: when I was halfway through the novel, there was another report, stating this time that the adpatation has been (re)titled There Will Be Blood. That's a far more foreboding, apocalyptic title, and I can't think of any element in Sinclair's narrative that this would be a reference to. Also, there's no real part for Daniel Day Lewis - the father would be the only option, and he's really too young for that part. Furthermore, the novel is too sprawling - adapted literally, it would either be overlong or severely, noticeably, truncated. It would come across, perhaps, as an unwieldy hybrid of The Aviator (minus the airplanes) and The Motorcycel Diaries (minus the motorcycle). In other words, as good as the source material may be, it would very likely not be a great film.

And honestly, who wants a literal adaptation? I'm much more excited when directors recognize outright that the two mediums are inherently different, and adherence does not often equate with success. Kubrick was always fond of finding relatively obscure novels or stories and adapting them - but to serve his own purposes, and not the book's. I imagine Anderson will be doing much of the same thing here - if his next project turns out to be this adaptation at all. I'll reiterate that this is all just speculation at this point - clearly, speculation I very much enjoy taking part in. And if nothing else, the novel was well worth the read, and that's all that really matters at this point, anyway. If it was all a ruse, then it was a ruse worth following.

So. On the subject of literature, I've just begun Cormac McCarthy's The Orchard Keeper, the only one of his novels I haven't read - at least until the new one is published in August. Also, spurred on by a post I made a few days ago, I decided to pick up Sterne's Tristam Shandy. I've only just begun it, but thus far, it's hilarous - and incidentally (or perhaps not), very similar in tone to 24 Hour Party People. I can already hear Steve Coogan narrating it...

Posted by David Lowery at May 7, 2005 4:20 PM

Comments

Posted by: atcooper at May 10, 2005 9:25 PM