Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
1/28/08
The
experience each person looks for at the movies falls somewhere along a
certain continuum between story and experience. On one end, there's
the impulse to be “told” a story, to empathize with characters and feel
the catharsis of what happens to them. On the other, there's something
we'll call “pure cinema”: the crafts of cinematography, music, editing,
art direction/costume design, visual effects and acting. Most regular
moviegoers stick far to the story end, while many who would consider themselves
cinephiles are looking for the immersive experience and often prefer that
it come unencumbered by conventional narrative. They are the ones
for whom There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson's epic tale of
turn of the century greed and misanthropy, will be a revelation.
It is surely awash in cinematic wonders, from one of Daniel Day-Lewis's
finest performances to its' brilliantly hateful mood and uniquely dissonant
score. But the hard-core story crowd will be left to scratch their
heads about what, if anything, we're to take from our 30-odd years in the
company of mad oilman Daniel Plainview and the bunch of stuff that happens
to him. Those of us who lie somewhere in the middle of the spectrum
can only take the good, leave the bad, and acknowledge that There Will
Be Blood is well worth experiencing for all its' virtues, but destined
to leave all but those most enraptured by its' cinematic spell asking “Huh?”
We
first meet Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) in long, dialog-free stretches
as he struggles first alone and then with partners like Fletcher Hamilton
(Ciaran Hinds) to pull oil out of the Earth using means as primitive as
ladders and buckets. As the sophistication of their operation increases,
so does the danger, and when one of the men is killed, he leaves behind
an infant at the camp site. Daniel knows nothing about children,
but either out of ambition, love or both takes the kid in. Flash
forward a few years and Daniel is now a full-fledged “oilman” with a slick
presentation about why those with Black Gold under their land should deal
with him, not the least of which is because he's running “a family business”,
complete with his adorable young “son” now named H.W. Plainview (Dillon
Freasier). One night, he's visited by Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), an
odd young man with a proposal: for a fee, he will tell Daniel where
there is a great untapped reserve of oil on land that can be easily purchased.
A deal is struck and soon the oilman is poking around the town of Little
Boston, specifically the ranch of Paul's father Able (David Willis).
There is only one obstacle to Daniel scooping up all the land he wants:
Paul's identical twin brother Eli (also Dano), a budding evangelist who
knows what the oil is worth and agrees to drop his objections to the deal
in exchange for a future “donation” of $5,000.00 to his church. Soon
enough, Little Boston is being converted into Plainview's own private oil
empire, while Eli's star also rises. When tragedy strikes and H.W.
goes deaf, Daniel finds another “family” member in his conveniently newfound
brother Henry (Kevin J. O'Connor). But as time passes, it becomes
clear that the only joy Daniel Plainview will ever know is seeing his competition
suffer and fail.
Let
us begin with There Will Be Blood's greatest virtue: another
amazing performance by Daniel Day-Lewis. Were he a man about town,
a snappy interview and not reputed to be frighteningly intense on set,
I think you'd hear a lot more often that he is one of the greatest, if
not THE greatest, film actors of all time. As Plainview, he is once
again totally transformed, with a captivatingly peculiar period accent
and the rickety body language of someone who's done the kind of back-breaking
work we see in the opening scenes. But most of all, he creates an
amazing character, far above and beyond what's on the page: a hateful
huckster who's nonetheless oddly charming and seems to have a genuine concern
for H.W. and the people who work for him... so long as that concern does
not inconvenience him. The dime on which he'll turn from familial
love to homicidal rage is terrifying, and we never doubt for a moment that
this is truly a man capable of ANYTHING. No doubt the film's final
scenes ask Day-Lewis to take the character places he really shouldn't,
but when he's on, he dominates the proceedings like no other actor this
(well, last) year. Plainview is a monster in ways that only gradually
become clear, but he's also delightful to watch slither about, and there
are even a fair number of laughs While no one could “keep up”
per se, Dano is also excellent and manages to hold his own in the other
major role. O'Connor is intriguing as the quietly simple Henry and
Freasier makes a strong screen debut as the kid.
For
most of the running time, Anderson sets a perfect mood by allowing the
camera to linger over the logistics of the turn of the century oil business
with old school literary flair (the film is loosely based on Upton Sinclair's
novel Oil!). Robert Elswit's sinister cinematography combines
with Jonny Greenwood's bizarre, creepy score to maintain an atmosphere
of menace. About that score: it's not like any movie music
you've heard before, played on period instruments and incorporating pieces
of music from the time into an overall product kinda like fingernails on
a chalkboard... only in a good way. It's pretty much spot-on until
an unaccountably bouncy number that plays over the end credits.
Which
brings us to the movie's issues. It's easiest to start with the ending,
a coda set in 1927 that shows an elderly, Howard Hughes-like Plainview
having explosive conversations with first the grown-up H.W. and then Eli.
By this point, Day-Lewis is following the material where it leads, but
his devolving vision of the character at the end of the line falls somewhere
between unwatchably hideous and unintentionally comic. And the things
that happen in that final bowling alley confrontation with Eli clarify
a fact that has lingered throughout the film: the juxtaposition of
these characters really doesn't say anything other than that oilmen are
greedy and evangelists are cowardly frauds. If one of them were named
George Bush it wouldn't be more obvious that the movie WANTS them to say
something about the times in which we live, but they just don't, at least
not anything we didn't bring into the theater with us. Sure, it's
fascinating the way we never can quite get under Daniel's skin and see
what makes him tick: does he love H.W.? Is there anything in
his heart besides hateful ambition? But at some point I expected
some kind of key to these locks: even Citizen Kane delivers
those goods at the very end. But while Kane's final shot is legend,
here the closing note is all wrong for what has brought us to that point.
Are we to assume we've been watching an oil-black comedy the whole time?
Another
critical error is the decision to make Paul and Eli twin brothers and then
make almost nothing of that fact. It's actually easier to process
the information we get as suggesting that they are in fact the same person.
Eli speaks about Paul only once, and then in a psychotic rage that suggests
that he's some kind of alternate personality rather than a real brother.
It was only in the closing moments that it became clear to me that's not
how the movie intends it to play, and it's pointlessly confusing.
There is no duality to the brothers, they're just... both played by the
same actor. In some ways, as good as Dano is and as interesting as
he and Day-Lewis's few scenes together are, Eli the character really gums
up the works of the Plainview character study that's going on whenever
he's not around because he demands that the movie either be some sort of
struggle or contrast between those two characters, something which just
isn't there. Eli is a coward and a weasel and the one time he scores
a victory over Daniel, it's dropped into his lap by a third party.
Plainview slaps him around and bulldozes him again and again to no real
effect. Everything, in the end, is too easy for Daniel: it's
just that none of what he accomplishes ever matters.
So
there you have it: There Will Be Blood puts an amazing performance
and some quality filmmaking into the service of a story that either completely
collapses or was never really there to start with. It is an engaging
film that will stay with you after it's over, but I suspect subsequent
viewings would reveal that it is even less than the sum of its' often contradictory
parts. Unless, of course, you're REALLY into the good parts.
You know who you are. |
