There Will Be Blood (2007) 5/10
Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an oilman who will let nothing stop his drive towards success. He develops a lifelong adversity with a preacher (Paul Dano) who has enormous over a town where Plainview wishes to drill. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
This was me giving P.T. Anderson one last chance. I didn’t like Boogie Nights, and I half-liked Magnolia (a beautiful mess if ever there was one), so this was Anderson’s last hurrah for me. Critics have said things like There Will Be Blood is his “most realized work” or whatever. To me it felt, in many ways, less recognizably Anderson: less histrionic until the bizarre final scene, but also less populous.
Part of the problem with this movie is there are no people in it, and no life. No one is living a life. No one makes love, eats, weeps, interacts, plays. It is a one-man show with a second man add-on. Daniel Plainview exists in a vacuum, and nothing breaks in to show us why we care about watching him for endless hours (and dear Lady, does this movie go on forever or what?). Daniel’s son, H.W., is a cipher, then he’s a deaf cipher; he’s never really a little boy. Plainview gives an early speech about the importance of families, but we see no women except peripherally, and few children.
I was strangely unimpressed with Daniel Day Lewis. I realize there is something blasphemous about impugning his God-like Acting Talents, but his Daniel Plainview didn’t draw me in. It was a less exciting performance than Gangs of New York, it was inhuman in its studied quality. Maybe that’s the point. Who knows?
I was looking for some kind of statement, it all seemed like it should have been symbolic; Capitalism vs. Religion or something, but no one in the film cared about those symbols, and ultimately I felt the movie failed as a vehicle of communication. I was told that the book it is based on, Oil by Upton Sinclair, is more or less a screed on behalf of socialism. And fine, I can see Anderson wanting to change that, but he should have changed to something. The symbols here are left dangling, like leftovers in the symbolism clearance department.
The cinematography is much-praised, but it was a dark, smokey, bleak film, and not the beautiful bleakness of John Ford’s Monument Valley. It felt like the landscape expressed the overall misery of Paul Sunday’s (Dano) flock, of Plainview’s life, of the movie itself.
Ultimately, it felt like wasted time. Now I know what “I drink your milkshake” means. So what?
Got to the end of that one and wanted those 5 hours of my life back…. I liked Boogie Nights, although I wasn’t as crazy about it as most reviewers, and I had no interest in seeing Magnolia (anti-Cruise backlash on my part), but Blood was just ugly all the way around.
Cruise was the best part of Magnolia. He was dark and villainous and crazy and I’ve never been able to see him as just a straight action guy again. It brought out something truly chilling. He should have gotten the Oscar for it (especially because Michael Caine sucked in Cider House Rules).
Blood held me. I have a taste for the harsh and the bleak and monomaniacal personalities. At the end I did have a “is that all there is” feeling. But not so much as I did at the end of Magnolia, which had me thoroughly steamed. The opening promised that it would all add up to some great tied-together idea, some wallopping irony. A rain of toads is not irony, especially when it makes no difference to any of the endless stories I sat through (I wanted to lock Anderson and Alanis Morissette in adjoining cages and lecture them on the definition of “Irony.”)
There were some great passages in Magnolia (note to Ken: Cruise was terrific in the movie. I could hardly believe it), just as there were in Boogie Nights, which I mostly liked without loving, and for the same reason. At the end it didn’t seem to amount to much.
And I hated Punch Drunk Love. Had no idea what the hell was going on, or why.
I have mixed feelings about “THERE WILL BE BLOOD”. It’s not exactly a favorite movie of mine. At times I found it claustrophobic and longed for the movie’s setting to spread beyond where Daniel Plainview had struck oil and the mansion he eventually built. And I was not that impressed by the movie’s last half hour (what is with these movie endings, lately?) Unlike you, I was very impressed by Daniel Day Lewis’ performance. At first, you would think it was rather theatrical. But what he didn’t say on the screen seemed to speak more volumes than what he did say. And I found the movie’s in-depth look into the oil industry also fascinating.
As I had said, I had mixed feelings.