Films Where You Cheer for the Bad Guy.

In film, the best monsters are human.

Now and again I will watch a movie where I might admire the bad guy. In some of those cases I find myself actually cheering him on. Even while I'm admitting this admiration for the monster I still realize that the hero is a creep but that he is imbued with such glowing traits that there's nothing to do but like him. Or, if not able to feel any affection for him, to realize that the evil dude is one seriously tough person with a true agenda.

The first movie I ever saw wherein the bad guy was effectively portrayed as the hero was the Paul Thomas Anderson film "There Will Be Blood". The hero in this case was Daniel Plainview, a sefl-described oil man portrayed so brilliantly by Daniel Day Lewis that he made me forget at times that I was watching a fiction. Plainview is described as a driven man with an obsession for wealth and the power it will give him over the rest of humanity, all of whom he finds disgusting. He even hates the rich among whom he hopes to one day live.

The first time we see Plainview he is busting his ass at hard labor, working to find a vein of silver that he can then sell off to create the seed money for what he knows will make him fantastically wealthy: oil. In fact, the movie is loosely based on the novel OIL by Upton Sinclair. We watch as this hard, rough, driven fellow almost blows himself up and, finding himself in the wreckage of the explosion that almost kills him discovers that he has at last located silver ore that will give him the economic leverage he so dearly needs.

Over and over Daniel is revealed to us as conniving, lying, ruthless, obsessive as only capitalism can make a man so. He wants that wealth so much that his persona seems to ache for it. And it's not just the masses he hopes to rise above by gaining this wealth--no. He hates the rich  at least as much as he hates the poor. Plainview is a complete monster, but even if we cannot identify with the needs that drive him, we are forced to admire the effort he uses to achieve his goals.

You can see his determination here. His will. His hatred of other humans.

Around the same time I saw "There Will Be Blood" I also saw a movie by the Coen Brothers' "No Country for Old Men" based (faithfully) on the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. After some exposition and the setting up of a seemingly rather complicated situation we are introduced eventually to the real central character of the film (and book), one Anton Chigurh. Chigurh is a kind of hired assassin with no loyalties beyond his own singular code, to which he adheres fanatically.

The assassin is portrayed in a frighteningly clear performance by Javier Bardem. It's almost as if Bardem had been born only to play this character as his crowning achievement. He gives us a driven person who may or may not even be a human. I've argued for some time that the story is just a retelling of the Jesus versus Satan myth with Bardem giving us his version of Satan, with Llwellyn Moss as Christ. And Chigurh is one Hell of a Satan. Not without his own kind of flaws, and certainly not infallible, but nonetheless relentless.

It is in this implacable force and through his resourcefulness that I was forced to admire Chigurh. While he may be the complete antithesis of what we think of as good, he never lies and he never steers away from his goal. Similarly to "Blood's" Plainview, we have a man who has his own code and who will not be denied it. Monstrous though Bardem's Anton may be, he remains true to that code to the very end.

With buckshot in his leg he manages to push on, never asking for help.

Another monster who is nonetheless admirable for many of the same reasons as the two already listed creatures is the Sicario of the film of that title, directed by Dennis Villeneuve and written by Taylor Sheridan. I wrote about this movie fairly recently and don't want to repeat any of the things I already mentioned. So I will be brief here and just say that the portrayal of the man who proves to be the principal character was by Benecio Del Toro who I have to admit is one of my favorite modern actors (like Bardem and Lewis).

The script of Sicario allows Del Toro to deliver a performance that moves across a kind of graph that does not allow you to peg down what kind of man you are seeing until the final scenes of the movie. He seems to be moral at some times. There are moments when he comes off as compassionate, even caring. But in the end you see a thing that is moved only by a kind of drive that is both monstrous and all too human. By the time the end credits rolled I found myself awed by the job of Del Toro as an actor, but realizing that the director and writer delivered the raw materials for the actor to refine. And the whole gave us a picture of the pests who actually do these things, who really do walk the Earth, who deliver to the people what we seem to somehow deserve by accepting what they do without much in the way of complaint.

Unlike the first two films, Sicario left us with a situation wherein we'll see a new film featuring the enigma called Alejandro.

Nothing will make sense to your American ears, and you will doubt everything that we do, but in the end you will understand.

My Favorite Movie Villains

There are many villains in film and literature. Unfortunately, most of them are one-dimensional, existing only to act as an adversary and to be a foil for the protagonists, or as a tool to move the plot. There are tons of such characters in our favorite movies.

But I don't care for these flat, uninteresting characters. There's nothing about them that inspires me. I want some depth to the people who move through the movies I watch; even the villains need to be human.

For this reason, my two favorite movie villains both appeared in great movies in the same year, 2007.

And I'll list them now in the order that they impress me.

First is Daniel Plainview from the absolutely brilliant Paul Thomas Anderson film, THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Plainview is just an amazing character all around. Tough, self-sufficient, driven, manipulative, intelligent, physically imposing, and utterly evil. This is a villain a person can admire. He does not whine and he does not deviate from his mission.

Plainview, as portrayed by Daniel Day Lewis, is just one of the best character studies I have ever seen on the screen. We see his strengths and his weaknesses. Why Lewis chose to do what appears to be an imitation of the voice of John Huston (or Clint Eastwood's version of John Huston), I can't say. But it works. It was perfect.

The best villains are the ones who are human.

When the film is mentioned it usually is in the context of recounting the "I drink your milkshake" scene. But that is, to my way of thinking, one of the greatest scenes of both revenge and self-destruction I've ever witnessed in a movie.

And so, number one on my short list of movie villains is Daniel Plainview from THERE WILL BE BLOOD.

My second favorite movie villain is Anton Chigurh from the Coen Brothers' 2007 film NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.

Now...Anton is not wholly human. Since the book and the movie are basically a retelling of the Jesus story, and Chigurh stands in as Satan, you can't very well list him as a man. I prefer to think of him as Satan in human garb, and this works for me.

As with Plainview, Chigurh is a driven, single-minded, implacable character who might be nudged slightly out of the way, but who is ultimately unstoppable and who will not be denied. In addition, his resourcefulness as implied on the screen is simple and beautiful and leaves the viewer with both a sense of dread and one of admiration. Force combined with ingenuity are his major tools, and all he really needs.

A smile from something that is not human.

The supernatural aspect of Chigurh could be a drawback to enjoying the way his actions unfold on the screen, but what keeps this from growing tired is that he is everywhere at once. Where one feels that he is often returning to the scene of a crime, the fact of the matter is that he never leaves, being with each of us all of the time. It's almost like a twisted version of the Tom Joad "I'll be there" speech from THE GRAPES OF WRATH. The only person he is never with in every moment is the Jesus-figure, Llewellyn Moss. And he still dogs him to a pair of deaths and takes his prize in the end.

As with Lewis' performance, I love the way Javier Bardem chooses to portray Satan/Chigurh. His flat, implacable way of speaking and moving is hypnotic and disarming. He knows where he needs to be and what he wants to do, but is almost always genuinely confused by people and the way that they think and emote. He is a frightening individual and I can see how someone could be scared of such a version of Satan.