With the possible exception of certain underwater adventures and outer-space stories, pretty much every movie relies on architectural symbolism, finding in the house where the hero lives, the saloon he drinks in or the city streets he caroms through in his getaway car some useful ways to sharpen its thematic message.
This year's Oscar nominees for best picture, though, exploit that symbolism to an unusually effective degree. Director Joe Wright begins and ends "Atonement," his version of the Ian McEwan novel, with a Highly Meaningful shot of a house. At the start it's a dollhouse version of the English manor where much of the action takes place, at the finish a dreamed-about cottage by the sea. In between -- at least when it's not trying to cloak itself in the gauzy light of a Chanel No. 5 commercial -- the film uses architecture to flesh out ideas about class, penance and the tedium that is part of any drawn-out war.
Yet it's the other pictures -- "There Will Be Blood," "No Country for Old Men," "Juno" and "Michael Clayton" -- that really lean on the visual importance of streets, office towers, churches, hotels, motels and lofts. And surprisingly enough, the four -- all set in the U.S., though "Juno" was filmed in Canada -- do so in pursuit of essentially the same theme: that American culture has always been a struggle between brash, ragged individuality and streamlined conformity, and conformity almost always wins out -- especially when it comes to making real money, and especially these days. Each of the four films is, in one way or another, not just a tribute to but also a requiem for eccentricity, the price one pays in this country for refusing to bend to homogenization, high-school popularity contests or corporate power.
In "There Will Be Blood," directed by Paul Thomas Anderson from a 1927 Upton Sinclair novel, the action begins in a hole, as Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) hacks away at a chunk of rock, pick-axing for oil. The vertical cut into the earth is the opposite of shelter: an anti-cave, a place that makes the man at the bottom of it fully vulnerable to both accident and weather.
But the work that Plainview and his crew do in that hole leads to oil, and oil leads to money, and money leads to buildings. Soon there is a kind of primitive architecture, the form of latticed oil derricks and listing little houses, sprouting up in the harsh, desolate landscape, followed soon by more permanent structures. The fire-and-brimstone preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) also moves into noticeably roomier digs, his new church shaping the Sunday morning rays into a perfect sunlight cross.
Still, as the architecture around them begins to look more impressive and more fixed, Plainview and Sunday remain primitives. Even after he moves into a mansion worthy of Charles Foster Kane, Plainview continues to sleep on the floor, as if nuzzling his cheek against the dirt he knows lies underneath the polished floorboards. And when he attacks the preacher in the basement bowling alley of that same grand house, it is less a Darwinian moment than an indication that these men are simply not cut out for an American culture learning to channel the physical aggression of a frontier nation into the camaraderie-building, revenue-generating leisure activity of a settled one.
The other western, "No Country for Old Men," takes place more than a half-century later, but it covers some of the same thematic ground. Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen from Cormac McCarthy's novel, it is essentially the story of three bow-legged anachronisms: Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a Vietnam vet named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) and the killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), the last two of whom leave a bloody trail through western Texas.
All around them is an architectural landscape that seems to be growing more placeless and forgettable by the year. What society gives up in exchange for prosperity and safety, the movie seems to say, is not only the kind of bloody code of ethics that Anton and Llewelyn follow to the point of absurdity, but also peculiarity and character, whether personal or aesthetic. Both the generic motels and the mirrored-glass office tower where much of the action takes place suggest a corner of the country losing its regional identity and quirkiness.
Sheriff Bell is about to retire; Llewelyn proves principled (or hard-headed) enough to get himself killed. What promises to be left after they're gone is a western Texas that looks more like everywhere else. When the action does move into a building with some sense of history and singularity, the stately and creaking Eagle Pass Hotel, the building seems as clearly doomed, as much of a relic, as the men who stalk its halls trying to blast each other full of holes.
