There Will Be Blood - Review

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Writer: Paul Thomas Anderson (from a book
by Upton Sinclair)
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis/Paul Dano
Runtime: 2 hr 38 minutes

I'm not sure what There Will Be Blood is supposed to be. At 2 hours and 38 minutes, you'd think the point would come across eventually.

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Long movies have a tendency to collapse under their own weight, but the critics never seem to mind.

Epics are made for critics. The longer a movie gets, the more chance a critic has to use flowery prose to describe it: sweeping, majestic, inspired, breathtaking. You'll note that these words can also be used to describe panoramic photographs of mountains, which most epics use with abandon.

I'm more in line with Hitchcock: "The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder."

There Will Be Blood is very Paul Thomas Anderson. He wrote it and directed it, which is one of the reasons for its length. Anderson has a hard time editing himself. His movies are usually quite long. In Boogie Nights, Anderson explored the world of pornographic filmmakers. In Magnolia, he explored the world of...something. In There Will Be Blood he explores the world of early oil.

Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an early 20th century prospector. He starts out in silver and eventually mines oil. He's good at it. With his 10-year-old son in tow, he buys acres of land from people, mines their oil, cuts them in on the take, then moves on to buy more land. He's charming, efficient, and shrewd.

Early in the film, he comes across a young man named Paul. Paul says that his family has oil on their ranch, and if Plainview gives him a few hundred bucks, he'll tell Plainview where it is. Plainview, fair and charming, agrees.

The rest of the film is a play-by-play of Plainview's dealings with the locals that live near the ranch. They're Christian fundamentalists, led by a faith healer that loves God as much as Plainview loves oil. Plainview wants to buy these people's land to exploit the oil beneath it, and he wants to get richer than he already is.

His relationship with his young son is touching. They're partners in a legal crime, and it's obvious that the boy emulates him. And so it goes, until an accident injures his boy, and Plainview turns into one of the more cynical, monstrous creatures ever put on film.

And I didn't buy it.

Paul Thomas Anderson's writing can be very over-the-top, and when he lets slip the dogs of war, they come out howling. Plainview is no different, and Daniel Day-Lewis can play this role blindfolded. He's excellent.

But is he excellent because he's Daniel Day-Lews, or because he's Plainview? Something that bothered me about There Will Be Blood kept coming up again and again. It was this: I'd met Plainview before, only last time his name was Bill the Butcher, also played by Daniel Day-Lewis, and the film was called Gangs of New York. They are entirely the same character, and I felt like I was watching a time warp: Bill the Butcher, years later, mining for oil and still the meanest sonofabitch alive.

The film is not boring, and is very watchable. I guess it's going for some sort of message. It could be anti-Church, or anti-Oil. Or maybe it's the triumph of Oil over Christ, or the power of greed over faith. Or the similarities between the two. Or not.

Daniel-Day Lewis does a great job with the role, but it seems like the same old, same old. You can see him enjoying the anger of the character, relishing the meanness. Somewhere deep inside Day-Lewis is a very dangerous, dark person. I wouldn't mess with him on the best of occasions. But in this film, you can audibly hear the gears shift from "shrewd, cutthroat, yet loving father," to "insipid, immoral bastard" from minute 100 to minute 101, and there doesn't seem to be any reason behind it, beyond say, letting Daniel Day-Lewis play a very mean Daniel Day-Lewis.

If you've seen as many "important" modern epics as I have, then you'll know that this one has a smash-cut-to-black coming at the end. It is the contemporary filmmaker's way of leaving you hanging and asking you to sit in your seat and say, "Hmm. A lot of unanswered questions. So it must have been good."

To me it is simply cheating. It tells me that no agreeable ending could be found out of the convoluted scenes that came immediately before. Far easier to leave the audience questioning and wondering than to end the story with a satisfying conclusion. No, not "happy," and not "agreeable." I said, "satisfying."

No Country For Old Men is another Best Picture nominee that used the anti-ending ending this year.

I still don't buy it.

Photos: Yahoo Movies

If you haven't seen the film yet, here's a sneak peek: