Category: Daniel Day-Lewis

MY LEFT FOOT (Ireland, 1989)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Jim Sheridan
CAST: Daniel Day-Lewis, Brenda Fricker, Fiona Shaw
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 98% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Christy Brown, born in 1932 with cerebral palsy, learns to paint and write with the only limb under his full control – his left foot.


For so many years, I have admired Daniel Day-Lewis as an actor, especially his performance in There Will Be Blood, which is the only performance I’ve seen on screen that has ever really motivated me to be a better actor myself.  However, I never got around to seeing his breakout movie, My Left Foot, until just recently.  All I can say is: WOW.  I had always assumed (big mistake) that this film would be a long, dark journey of the soul leading finally to an uplifting climax, but not after a lot of scenes of heartbreak and pathos and general gloom.  I could not have been more wrong.  There is as much heartwarming joy in My Left Foot as it’s possible to contain in any film, and it’s balanced by acknowledgement of Christy Brown’s condition and his down days and his struggles.  It’s a brilliant high-wire act, flawlessly performed both in front of and behind the camera.

Christy Brown is born with cerebral palsy in Ireland in 1932 to a Catholic family that grows in number almost through the entire film.  In a day and age that was simply not equipped to handle disabled children, Christy’s father is blunt: “He’ll go in a coffin before any son of mine will go in a home.”  While his motives were probably more about saving face in his community than anything altruistic, it’s this attitude that most likely saved Christy’s life.  Christy is brought home where his parents and his many sisters and brothers acknowledge and learn to work around his condition, but they refuse to treat him as anything other than a “normal” playmate and sibling.  Some of the happiest scenes in the film are when the children push Christy around in a wheelbarrow, racing up and down their street, as much for his enjoyment as for theirs.

Christy’s mother (Oscar-winner Brenda Fricker) patiently learns how to interpret young Christy’s unintelligible grunts and constantly shifting facial expressions, so it seems as if they’re communicating with each other in a secret language.  When young Christy shocks the family by picking up a piece of chalk with his left foot and writing “MOTHER” on the floor, the father’s response made me smile and smile: he carries Christy to the local pub and announces, “This is Christy Brown!  My son!  Genius!”  If this didn’t happen in real life, it bloody well should have.

(I also loved the bit where the older Christy plays soccer with his friends.  As a very capable goalie, no less.  When the time comes to take a penalty kick, his brothers line him up carefully on the ground so he can use his deadly left foot to rip the back of the net.  Or storage shed, whatever.)

I mention all these moments and interactions between Christy and his family because they are at the core of what makes this movie special.  Yes, Day-Lewis’s performance is the stuff of legend, there’s no denying that.  But the screenwriters are very careful to let us see that, despite his literally crippling affliction, Christy never lacked an unshakeable support structure.  I found myself wondering if I had the kind of fortitude, not to persevere like Christy, but to go all in on supporting a sibling or any loved one, loving them, and always being there for them.  It’s easy enough to say I am willing to do things like that.  I only hope, if I were ever faced with that kind of challenge, that I would meet it with the same kind of unconditional grace and love exhibited by the family of Christy Brown.  Here endeth the introspective portion of this review.

I can’t tell you enough how enthralling and well-balanced this film is.  In my experience, most movies about characters with terminal illnesses tend to wallow too deeply in the grief and sorrow associated with that illness.  My Left Foot makes a conscious decision to establish the illness, lay down the boundaries, and then move forward as if the main character weren’t ill at all.  In a sense, that is the case with Christy Brown in the first place.  As brilliantly portrayed by Day-Lewis, you can always see the mind at work behind the uncontrollable gestures.  There is nothing at all wrong with his mind, only his body, which betrays him and frustrates him.

There is one specific scene that seems to stick in the mind of everyone who sees the film.  Christy has been taken under the wing of a doctor, Eileen Cole (Fiona Shaw) who specializes in treating his condition.  His speech improves, his painting improves.  He falls in love with her.  In an agonizing scene, he confesses his love to her in a restaurant while several other associates look on.  She mistakes his declaration of affection and informs him of her engagement to another man at the table.  After a stunned silence, Christy uses his loudest speaking voice and carefully and very slowly says, “Congratulations.”  Director Jim Sheridan points the camera, not at Christy, but at the horrified and embarrassed dinner guests at the table, and at the other restaurant patrons who stop and stare in disbelief at the noises Christy is forcing into the air.  He has some other choice words regarding platonic love, and the scene ends with him pulling the tablecloth off the table with his teeth.

The emotions on display in this scene were so raw and honest and painful that I found myself covering my eyes a bit.  I felt every bit as embarrassed as those dinner guests.  But I also felt enormous empathy for Christy.  He is raging, not only at Dr. Cole and her rejection of his affection, but at the fates that locked his soul away in a body that was a constant reminder of his “differentness.”  Later scenes show us that he was able to make peace to a much greater degree in later life, but these scenes and others reveal the unimaginable conflict in his sharp mind.

I’m rambling, I think.  I don’t feel I have successfully conveyed how joyous My Left Foot truly is.  I had a goofy smile on my face for the first half hour of the movie.  I laughed out loud many times, especially at Christy’s father’s wake, a scene I vividly remember seeing at the Oscars that year.  Christy Brown was not a perfect man, and the movie does not pretend that he is.  But the movie does end on a wonderful high note that would be crushingly melodramatic in almost any other film.  My Left Foot earns it by showing us his journey, completely, concisely, and with enormous understanding.

PHANTOM THREAD

By Marc S. Sanders

I remember how much I loved Anderson’s 90s films Boogie Nights and Magnolia as well as the hauntingly genuine There Will Be Blood. (Let’s not talk about Punch Drunk Love.) Still, I never expected to like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, but as soon as it began, I fell in love with it.

Daniel Day Lewis plays a perfectionist dressmaker adept at using women at his behest to sustain and elevate his craft. He’s a ruthless, maybe bipolar, villain and he will remain as one of cinema’s best actors for at least the next hundred years.

Anderson doesn’t just show his characters. He shows their specialties whether it’s dressmaking, porn, show biz or oil. The industry is its own character. Here he masterfully depicted the industry of clothes making.

Anderson offers a convincing education in dress design and fabric construction with the details and measurements it requires. Swatches of fabric never looked sexier amid a mid 20th century European backdrop. The dialogue is uncompromising in its humor, craft and cruelty both from and to its characters.

The ending was very obscure and strange though. Thankfully it happens quickly and is not dragged out, otherwise my opinion might be different.

This Best Picture nominee from 2017 is definitely worth a look.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Ciarán Hinds
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 91% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A story of family, religion, hatred, oil, and madness, focusing on a turn-of-the-century prospector in the early days of the business.


My first draft of this review got up to nearly 1300 words before I realized I was just spinning my wheels.  This is quite simply one of the most original, most daring, most engrossing films of the new millennium that I have ever seen.  And after a while, my first draft became just a list, ticking off and describing scenes that I feel make it great, rather than a precise review.

So instead of giving a full film summary, which you can find elsewhere online, I’m going to try and instead give an actual review.  I’m going to gush a little bit (no pun intended), because it’s a masterpiece, but I’m just going to have to live with that, I guess.

When I first saw this movie (with my good friend Marc Sanders, as it happens, at a free preview), I remember leaving the theater feeling inspired.  Daniel Day-Lewis’s Oscar-winning performance in There Will Be Blood has, to this day, been in the back of my mind every time I’m on stage, whether it’s a drama, comedy, or whatever.  It genuinely makes me want to be a better actor.  Oh, I’ve seen great performances before from the likes of Nicholson, Hoffman, O’Toole, and the rest, but there’s something about the laser-like intensity of Day-Lewis’s performance as Daniel Plainview that had me gawping at the screen in awe as the film played out.  I can’t fully explain it.  It was, and remains, a religious experience to behold.

(For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Daniel Plainview is a turn-of-the-century prospector who thrives in the early days of the oil boom in America, but when his ambition crosses paths with a fire-and-brimstone preacher named Eli Sunday, things get a little testy.)

So, there you go, the acting is not just top-notch, it’s revelatory.

But then there’s the movie itself, exhibiting a level of craftsmanship I haven’t seen since the heyday of Stanley Kubrick.  The plot itself reads like one of those summaries of films that great directors dreamed of making, but were unable to for various reasons, like Kubrick’s unrealized biography of Napoleon.  I mean, who wants to see a 160-minute movie about oil drilling?  Why would anyone care?  Why should anyone care?

Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s ingenuity relies heavily on the acting and casting choices, and of course the ingenious screenplay, but any discussion of the film also has to mention the score.  As much as any other element, the film’s musical score creates and sustains a mood of dread and suspense over such banal scenes as pipeline being laid, oil derricks being built, men surveying land, etcetera.  The atonal and urgent score suggests that what we’re seeing is the prelude to some sort of apocalyptic event or incipient bloodshed.  It keeps you on the edge of your seat, as if around the corner an earthquake or mass murder is waiting.

(Sometimes the ABSENCE of the score is just as disturbing, as in the scene in a church when Daniel Plainview is reluctantly baptized, or most of the scenes in the finale, taking place in 1927.)

But ticking off these technical details still feels lacking.  This is the second draft of this review, and I still feel as if I’m not getting across how much this movie works on the viewer.  Or, at least, how it worked on ME.  This was only the third time I’ve watched the movie since first seeing it in 2007, and I was hooked all over again, right from the opening shot, with those dissonant strings playing over a panorama of sunbaked hills and scrub brush.

The movie just FEELS perfect.  It’s anchored by Daniel Day-Lewis, who is in literally every scene except two that I can recall.  But the artistry of everything else at play is just…I am at a loss for words.  It is, as another review puts it, “wholly original.”  There is just nothing else like it.  Sure, it’s definitely inspired by Kubrick, but it takes things to another level.

It’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen.