There Will be Blood--Movie Review

If I read another review of this movie in which the word "epic" is used to describe it, I think I will puke. For example, the NY Times critic Manohla Dargis called it, in overblown prose, "Paul Thomas Anderson's epic American nightmare..." An epic, as the OED informs us, "celebrates in the form of a continuous narrative the achievements of one or more heroic personages of history or tradition." We have the Iliad and Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, the Aeneid and Paradise Lost. Those are epics because they deal with themes of great intensity and significance with such charged and powerful language that the resultant composition/production must be memorized in order fully to be appreciated. I could imagine an epic about the United States (where There Will Be Blood takes place), but it would have to deal with themes of a bit more grandeur and with insight into personality a bit more compelling than in There Will be Blood. Make no mistake, however. Daniel Day-Lewis delivers a riveting performance as wildcat oilman Daniel Plainview. And understanding the theme of oil money in the making of the West is hugely important.

But when we use the word "epic," I think of another word that should follow quickly in its wake: "sweep." Something epic in its sweep would take an even larger theme, such as a significant national war, the forging of the nation, the institution of slavery, the westward migration, the marginalization/decimation of the American Indian. Epics treat great themes in high language and give an insight into people through it all. Well, if we don't have an epic here, what do we have?

There Will Be Blood--Summary and Analysis

What we have is the story of a man, Daniel Plainview, originally from Fon du Lac, WI, who explored the West looking for silver and oil in the late 19th/early 20th century. The film gives us four "snapshot dates" in Plainview's life: (1) 1898, when he is a relatively young man engaged in solo silver mining; (2) 1902, where he leads a small but successful oil exploration venture of about 10 men; (3) 1911, by far the biggest chunk of the film, where he becomes a successful but increasingly harried and disagreeable oilman, especially as he relates to the religious community where his explores (CA); and (4) 1927, where he becomes unglued, disowns his son and kills the preacher with whom he had tussled in (3).

There is brilliance and insight in each of the "snapshots," though when you put them all together at the end, you get less than you hoped for. The first scene, shot in complete silence, shows the gritty life of the miner, who faces danger, suffers severe injury from a fall into the mine shaft and struggles to make it to safety. We are skillfully brought into the violence, danger and risk to life for the ambitious Western man at the end of the 19th century. The second scene, four years later, portrays both danger and poignancy. An accident in Plainview's mine kills a man, and Plainview adopts the dead man's infant son. Little signs of affection, such as Plainview's cooing and stroking the baby boy's hand, shows a tenderness that we are surprised, but pleased, to see.

The third scene, which lasts probably about half of the film, presents the unfolding of a complex relationship between Plainview and his men and a religious community in Central CA where Plainview wants to buy land to explore for oil. With his son, who is now about 10 and dresses as a small man (whom Plainview refers to as his "partner"), Plainview presents himself as a "family man" who only wants the best for the community. We see in this presentation a sort of huckster-type charm that is backed up by the force of a steely disposition and temperament which will come out on one occasion when Plainview confronts, attacks and humiliates the minister of the community, Eli Sunday.

Finally, the fourth scene, 16 years later, shows Plainview demonstrating his misanthropy in his "Citizen Kane-like" mansion in CA. It wasn't until this scene, however, that it dawned on me what this film lacked and why I, though mesmerized by Day-Lewis' performance, was ultimately unsatisfied with the movie. By the time we arrive at 1927, as said, Plainview is a hate-filled, retaliatory, man. But we have no sense of character development in the movie; we simply have snapshots or vignettes. Though we might have expected something of Plainview's attitude in 1927 to have arisen out of the 1911 scenes, we are really unable to understand or explain why he peremptorily cuts off his son in 1927 (the ostensible reason is the son's setting up a competitive company in Mexico) or violently kills Eli Sunday at the end of the movie.

More promising to investigate, which director Anderson begins to explore in the 1911 scene, is the bitterness Plainview feels towards the neatly coiffed and scrubbed Standard Oil men who want to capitalize on his hard work by coming in and buying him out for a price below what Plainview thinks his oil is worth. His bitterness and resentment at these easy-living wealthy Easterners who have time and money to enjoy their steak dinners while never getting their hands dirty with oil, is a theme potentially explorable. But it isn't explored further.

Conclusion

The cinematography and editorial direction of the play are stunning. Riveting are the geysers of oil; absolutely awe-inspiring is the fire that eats up the derrick set up to allow mining of the oil. In addition, rarely have I seen scenes of the kind of violence that we see in this film. There are two kinds of violence--through equipment failures leading to crushing deaths, and through human will, culminating in Plainview's beating of Eli Sunday to death with a bowling pin from his mansion. The terrible ferocity of the sickening thuds will not be easy to forget. But, ultimately, we have not a hero here, nor a person who, in my mind, was relatively more callous or ambitious or greedy than one imagines an raw oilman to have been. We have a story played very well by a leading contemporary actor, but the insight into personality and history is minimal. Any person attempting to draw a moral from the story, to paraphrase Mark Twain, ought to be shot. And Daniel Plainview could probably take care of that, too..

3367