Movies have probably grown worse over the years, generally speaking. But in this century and the years immediately preceding, they've grown worse in a weirdly unpleasant way, or combination of ways. The why and how are mysterious.

I'm referring only to serious movies. Not romantic comedies, which are only a little worse than they ever were, or blood-and-thunder adventure stories, which are probably a little better, or at least bigger. I'm referring to the movies that never crack a smile and, if any spectator should be injudicious enough to do so, wipe it right off his face. There Will Be Blood is one of these. So it isn't uniquely bad, but it's worse, or at any rate less easily watchable, than most others. I believe that's because it was made by a director, and with a star, who were out of their element.

So sober have movies become these days that their very titles are threats: There Will Be Blood; No Country for Old Men; Atonement. They warn us that they're going to be no fun, so don't even look for it. And they deliver on the threat.

Every couple of decades, movies go through a phase of ordeals, of putting the audience through the mill. Sometimes the object is just to sell the show by challenging people to see if they're tough enough to take it; other times, as lately, the object is redemption, or the illusion of it. The movies are a penance for our imagined sins, and after suffering through them we're supposed to emerge purified, or feeling purified. And Hollywood always this kind of movie for Oscars, as though in an effort to be purged of its sins, too.

Only now, following in the classic American tradition of both eating our cake and having it, the redemption is at second hand: we're no longer expiating our own sins but someone else's, putting us two up morally. In the era of There Will Be Blood, the wrongdoers aren't us, aren't characters we can identify ourselves with; they're the other guy: probably, in these war years, the President who "started" it.

The movies seek to improve us, not to interest us. This used to be their primary concern, but they gave it up at the onset of the 90s, and now don't even make the pretense of enlisting our attention. Evidently they feel they don't need it any more, and they're perfectly right. Once their success depended on the audience's good will; now they're all presold in advance and have no need to cater to anybody.

As a pair of contrasting examples, take My Left Foot and this movie (which, coincidentally, star the same actor). My Left Foot, which came at the close of the prior era, the era of audience involvement, opened with the main character putting a record on a gramophone and switching the gramophone on--all using his foot. I defy anyone who sees that not to want to find out who the person is that can do that.

There Will Be Blood opens with the main character picking away in a mine, and keeps on him doing this for possibly fifteen minutes. Who he is, where he is, and what he's about, other than mining, we don't know. We're not even granted a voice-over narration, of the type to which almost every movie nowadays succumbs to avoid having to do its job.

This abundance of voice-overs testifies to the same fault as our uninvolvement in the movies: the movies are incompletely written, their stories not fully worked out, their characters only half-understandable. Reviewers sometimes point out the unsatisfactory endings, not noticing that they're unsatisfactory because the beginnings and middles were the same. If the stories were sound, and the movie makers stuck to them, they'd go a long way toward making up for, or rectifying, the other faults described.

In There Will Be Blood, when the story finally does start, it doesn't move naturally, but lurches or lunges from one tableau to another. Eventually it becomes more consecutive, but it never unbends. In this, too, it's typical of today's movies. They assume a stiff and sober demeanor, like someone dressed up in mourning clothes that are too tight; rigid in posture, slow of step. They're movies that can hardly move.

This one didn't have to be that way. Daniel Day Lewis, who dominates it utterly, is by nature a restricted and restricting actor, but there have been times when he's been able to break free of his bonds. Always this has been when he's playing a character who's analogously blocked and has to fight through what's blocking him, cf. Christy in My Left. His role in this movie is the opposite, freewheeling and unbounded: a zealous proselytizer for free enterprise. It's a part for a big, expansive actor, and out of Lewis's natural range. So is the American accent he affects, which becomes a kind of speech impediment and renders the emotional meanings of his scenes almost uninterpretable.

The director is on the wrong track also. In a previous movie, Punch Drunk Love, Paul Thomas Anderson showed his natural metier was comedy--pessimistic screwball comedy, to judge by that movie, which was lovely and intuitive. Anderson could be the next Preston Sturges. But here he's being Terence Malick, with a static, disjointed historical epic whose eye that keeps drifting toward the landscape and whose leading character talks funny. The difference from Malick's movies is that they're always watchable and occasionally light up the past, albeit in flashes. They indicate that Malick is given to meditating on the past, whereas this movie indicates Anderson is little at home there, and isn't particularly meditative. He's a good guy and a talented moviemaker; he's simply in the wrong ballpark.

A serious film--the real thing--is not that hard to differentiate from the would-bes. It has that within which passeth show; these but the trappings and the suits of woe.