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There Will Be Blood - Ray’s Review
Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, There Will Be Blood, has been receiving accolades for a solid month - hell, it just won star Daniel Day Lewis a Golden Globe - yet it hasn’t been shown theatrically to most of the country. If you don’t live on the coasts, you might as well be dead.
And while no film can live up to the monumental hype surrounding this film, it still manages to disappoint due to a misguided second half.
Day Lewis stars as Daniel Plainview, a determined and ruthless oil man around the turn of the century. He arrives in a small California town after receiving a tip of a tremendous store of oil beneath it. Accompanying him is H.W. Plainview (Dillon Freasier), a little boy orphaned to him in a previous oil-drilling accident. Daniel presents himself as a family man to the townspeople, which gains their trust long enough for Daniel to siphon all of the oil from their property. This course puts him in direct conflict with the local preacher in town, Eli Sunday, played with a bit too much gusto by Paul Dano.
The first forty minutes of this film, especially the long, wordless introduction, is gripping, unrelenting, and as perfectly shot and edited as any film ever. During this section, Day Lewis completely commands the screen as Daniel Plainview, needing nothing more than a steely gaze or simple body language to convey the character’s hideous psychology. Anderson wrings every bit of grime, dirt, and decay from this section; it is truly masterful filmmaking.
However, the intricate spell cast by the film unravels in a clumsy and misjudged second half of this overlong film. The ruthless and and disciplined demeanor of Day Lewis’ earlier depiction fades, replaced by some Jack Nicholson-style craziness that had the audience laughing. The pathos and shock for which Anderson reaches never really materializes, and the film devolves into arm-waving showboating. The change in tone destroys the understanding of the character as built in earlier scenes. It would be a shame if the accolades bestowed on Day Lewis’ performance came from this section of the film, since his earlier work in it was much, much stronger.
Technically, the film is wondrous. The cinematography is museum-ready. Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood supplies a score of bizarre electronics and shrieking strings; it’s the closest score in years to the legendary ones for The Shining and Psycho.
I will add something about the ballyhooed ending to the film: I understand what it means, but I didn’t like it. While nearly as abrupt as the much-discussed ending to No Country For Old Men, Blood fails to transport, preferring to stick with cheap brutality and an unpleasantly humorous final line.
While There Will Be Blood is a good film and definitely worthy of viewing, it does not coagulate into a cohesive movie like many of the new classics of 2007.
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Great Review! I loved the music in this film and am sorry I didn’t mention it in my review. This film just missed the mark of greatness.