Movie Review: There Will Be Blood

It's taken me a while to write this review of There Will Be Blood. In many ways this is a great film. Director Paul Thomas Anderson and star Daniel Day-Lewis are both at the top of their craft. The reviews are very good, all touting how well made it is, but few if any try to describe what it means and that's where There Will Be Blood falls short.

It tells the story of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a miner who starts off in silver and moves to oil. He adopts an orphaned boy and names him H.W. From a young age H.W. is part of the business, particularly when Daniel pitching himself as a family man to people he wants to buy oil rights from. After a tip, they head to Little Boston, California to a small ranch with oil. Daniel buys the ranch from the Sunday family and as they start to mine a small town forms. Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) founds a church and he and Daniel dislike each other. The rest of the film describes Daniel's journey of negotiating with the town and standard oil and others while trying to raise H.W. and deal with a long lost brother. Daniel is harsh and short tempered and perhaps at times evil.

Every visual aspect of this film is astonishing. The sets of a small town in the middle of a scrubby desert are great, Deadwood only wishes it had the budget for this town's set. The costumes, however much covered in mud or oil make it all seem authentic. The camera work is fluid, every scene feels perfectly captured. Shots of an oil rig burning reminded me of Days of Heaven.

The first 15 minutes are a wordless, a tour de force, just as the beginning of 2001 is. Lewis' Daniel Plainview is alone working in a silver mine. The scene shows how difficult and dangerous the work is and what kind of man it took to pursue a living that way. For as simple a scene as it is, it's engrossing, suspenseful, surprising and stark. Next a few years later you see Plainview has switched to oil mining with a small team.

The music reminded me of Philip Glass or Planet of the Apes. You will either love or hate it. I did both. I loved it at times and hated it at times. Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood should be nominated for best original score but was disqualified because Anderson choose some existing music for a few scenes.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays Plainfield as John Huston. He commands every scene he's in which is just about all of them. But the weakness of the film is that it provides so little background or explanation for Daniel's actions. He's all about work and winning and in his deepest conversation merely says he doesn't like people. He almost opens up to family but that's rather short lived. He has no interest in woman at all and that's never touched on. For a film that seems like a character study, there's very little to study.

Can a two hour and 40 minute film that covers 40 years in a man's life not be trying to explain him or be a metaphor for something else? The main complaint against this film is that it's not about something. Armond White says it well: "Plainview’s family-narrative tree suggests what Pauline Kael said about Days of Heaven: You can hang all your old metaphors on it. It’s never clear what Anderson intends these characters to mean—for Plainview or us." Then again a friend I saw it with liked it because it wasn't even trying to be more, it was just a good story and I have to agree with that. But I wanted more, even though the first 15 minutes really were enough for me and the rest was just gravy on top of that.