The Third Draft

There Will Be Blood (2007)                            Back to Reviews
by Coach Patton
©D. Patton, All Rights Reserved
 
Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson
Screenplay by: Paul Thomas Anderson
Based on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair
Cinematography: Robert Elswit
Music: Jonny Greenwood
 
Running Time: 2:38 Rated: R for some violence.
Featuring:  Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Dillon Freasier, Ciarán Hinds, Kevin J. O'Connor
 
Daniel Day-Lewis won the Best Actor Golden Glove Award and an Oscar for Best Actor for his role in this movie.
 
PLOT: A turn-of-the-century prospector buys the oil rights to a family's ranch, and then hits a major pocket of crude. The plot follows Daniel Plainview from his humble beginnings as a miner, showing his grit and determination through some fairly large hardships, to his success as a millionaire oilman and then to his fall, living among his personal demons in a beautiful house but away from the oil fields he knew so well.
 
There Will Be Greed. There Will Be Vengeance.
 
In his new movie, There Will Be Blood, the auteur filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson (he of Boogie Nights and Magnolia) took a lesser known novel by Upton Sinclair, Oil!, and turned it into a long, boring rumination on . . .    on . . . well, that's part of the problem—he never really gets around to making a point.

In turn-of-the-century central California, ambitious prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), while searching for gold and silver, strikes an oil cash-cow. He  and turns it into a business, set on the incendiary frontier of California's turn-of-the-century petroleum boom.

When Plainview gets a mysterious tip-off that there's a little town out West where an ocean of oil is oozing out of the ground, he heads with his nine-year-old son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), to take their chances in dust-worn Little Boston, California.  In the hardscrabble town, where the main excitement centers around the Holy Roller church of charismatic preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano, the silent brother of Little Miss Sunshine) Plainview and H.W. make their lucky strike.

But even as the oil discovery raises all of their fortunes, nothing will remain the same as conflicts escalate and every human value—love, hope, community, belief, ambition and even the bond between father and son—is imperiled by corruption, deception and the flow of oil. Or at least that’s how a decent screenwriter would approach this story.

Instead, writer/director Anderson chooses to spend almost three hours giving us the life of the a disagreeable wildcatter named Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) without ever scratching below the obvious. And yet, I’ll bet I'm going to be in the minority of critics here. Anderson, (of whom I am a fan) this time around confuses intensity with art.

He admirably approaches There Will Be Blood with a keen eye for visual details and a few individually riveting character moments. However, the details about what was going on in the oilfields were sadly lacking in spite of what other reviewers might believe.

The opening hour of setup is the most successful segment, and Anderson is so assured in his dramatic beats and exacting staging that one barely notices that fifteen minutes have gone by with no more than a word or two of dialogue. The second act is especially slow-going, taking twice as long as need be to get his points across and setting up conflicts that are never resolved.

Meanwhile, other central characters, particularly that of Eli Sunday, vanish for such long periods of time that it exposes the screenplay's and/or editing's slack unevenness. Anderson spends all of his time flirting between showing us a Plainview who is obsessed with money and a Plainview who is obsessed with power. He never gives us any reason to care about what happens to Plainview or anyone around him. It doesn't matter if his character is good or evil if he doesn't have anything else; he's a cardboard figure being moved around at the whim of his writer/director. What we never get is a Plainview who is a complete, well-rounded human being; nor do we find out why Plainview is such a wretch.

I'll sit and watch a film about a bastard of a human being (Raging Bull comes to mind) and enjoy it immensely, but I want to know I'm in capable hands. Plainview comes across as a caricature, a one-dimensional figure that has been created to serve a point of view, not a character designed in service of a story.

With Anderson, I get the terrible feeling he knows as little about Plainview as he shows us and that's just plain frustrating. I'm not saying we need Plainview to be redeemable, not at all, but we should, at least, have a basis for understanding his actions. We should care if he lives or if he dies. Of course, the up-shot of this is that we, as an audience, never have anything to latch onto, anything to care about.

With its foreboding title, There Will Be Blood makes a promise that it doesn't keep. What writer-director Anderson—in the first stumble of his career as a filmmaker—does not fulfill is the suggestion throughout that his leisurely paced, gorgeously mounted period epic is leading toward an explosive conclusion. Instead, the ending takes an awkward turn toward goofiness and culminates on an under-whelmingly bitter note that doesn't add up to much.

Jonny Greenwood's (he of Radiohead) mood-drenched sound track score is weird, eerie, bombastic and off-balance, like something out of a horror film. It was distracting as hell for this viewer.

Performance-wise, while Daniel Day-Lewis runs the show, Paul Dano ably goes head-to-head with him as the gospel-spouting Eli Sunday, and young newcomer Dillon Freasier is staggeringly expressive as H.W., who doesn't have a lot to say and doesn't need to. I'm sure someone much smarter than I will come up with a theory explaining how the two antagonists are both sides of the same character—that Eli's devotion to God and Plainview's devotion to greed makes them irrevocably intertwined, but you know, it just doesn't work. We'd need more depth to truly grasp the intricacies of this relationship—which we might have had perhaps if it had been made into a mini-series for TV, with Larry McMurtry writing the screenplay and Simon Wincer directing (the team that brought us Lonesome Dove).
 
Ultimately, I was bored while waiting for There Will be Blood to get around to telling me something, anything, which would make me want to stick around. Or at least that’s How It Seemed from Where I Sat.
 

What’s it worth?          
For Daniel Day Lewis fans -- matinee price at your local cinema For the average viewer --- wait for the free showings on cable.

 
ROLL CREDITS
Written & Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson
Based on: the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair
Cinematography: Robert Elswit
Music: Jonny Greenwood
CAST
 Daniel Day-Lewis—Daniel Plainview
Kevin J. O'Connor—Henry Brands
Ciarán Hinds—Fletcher Hamilton
Dillon Freasier—H.W. Plainview
Barry Del Sherman—H.B. Ailman
Russell Harvard—H.W. Plainview – Grown-up
Paul F. Tompkins—Prescott
Paul Dano—Eli Sunday

FADE TO BLACK
In The Name Of Truth, Justice and In the Service of A Higher Good, I Remain Your Friend, Movie Reviewer and Spiritual Advisor, Coach Patton

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