Many times the favorite works of a director give us the necessary clues to finish fitting in and understand his work, giving us the necessary context to focus on it. Sometimes they can be very literal influences, which is when the border between reference and direct copy is bordered, or it can simply be foundation stones with which to expand ideas already shown.
A priori it might seem that a film like ‘Wells of Ambition’ is unlike any other, with its tortured and twisted character, the striking rural setting, the extreme portrait of unbridled ambition and mishandled masculinity, oil wells that become almost brutalist images in beautiful landscapes. But Paul Thomas Anderson does not hide where it all comes from, citing the epic ‘Giant‘ by George Stevens.
As big as Texas
You can’t talk about ‘Giant’ without mentioning the word “epic”, now appropriate for very noisy and action-packed shows but that in decades like the forties or fifties were also applied to Immense dramas, both in dimension and emotion. Stevens undoubtedly fulfills both in a huge film of more than three hours with some great Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean who gave the last performance of him before he died.
The film shows us turbulent and passionate relationship between a young and ambitious landowner from Texas and a rich and beautiful girl from the East. They come from opposite worlds and the barriers are noticeable, and a good part of the film tries to explore that complex abyss that separates them. At the same time, a young and arrogant employee of theirs becomes enemies with them and tries to surpass them in status and wealth by searching for oil in apparently dry lands that they have bequeathed to him.
‘Gigante’ covers a wide spectrum of time, from youthful fervor and urgency to twilight senescence, following conflicts of power and wealth that seek to reflect the fractured essence of the american dream. Stevens uses an immense melodrama to maintain the tension throughout the extensive footage and the different generations, also relying on his great leading trio and makeup to simulate aging that is, to say the least, questionable.
‘Giant’: classic epic with a look to the future
That aspect is one of those that can be drawn from this, on the other hand, majestic story. Taylor and Hudson show incredible chemistry that helps make the main skeleton romance believable, along with a racial conflict presented with a certain broad brush but without being annoying. Dean works pretty well as free verse despite tendencies that might be exaggerated and even abhorrent, but the film manages to give them enough ground to show a twisted and shocking character.
Sure, Dean’s Jett Rink looks like a clear inspiration for the Daniel Plainview of Daniel Day-Lewis and Anderson, and the theme of the excessive ambition with the oil wells in the background is also a fundamental base from which the director grows to make his own epic work.
However, the dramatic emotion of Stevens’s film distinguishes it and makes it one of the great movies of the fiftiesas classic as the first harbinger of a new Hollywood that is yet to come (a Dennis Hopper who would later form part of that revolution is appearing right there).
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