3 reviews

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Anon. March 3, 2008

In the words of Public Enemy, "Don't believe the hype." Yes it's dark and unsettling, but in the same way that the exaggerated 'torture porn' films of late might be. The setting of the film in certainly engaging, and as the characters are laid out you're expecting a complex and calculated drama. Unfortunately the plot descends quickly into pointless violence and farcical overacting.

As menacing as Daniel Day Lewis's character might be, there is no explanation to his descent into madness. In fact, descent is not even the right word... there is very little evolution of plot or character, simply embellishment beyond reason. Day-Lewis's performance may be entertaining to watch, and it is the only one which is, but it has none of the subtlety and charisma of Forrest Whittaker's psychotic Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.

The images and music of There will be Blood are effective in painting the bleakness and desperation of the Texas frontier, but no more so than the recent Assassination of Jesse James or even No Country for Old Men. Unfortunately there seems to be little substance beyond this atmospheric stage. It ends up feeling like a grand allegory of nothing. Every plotline that could provide interest is crudely tied off with violence, clumsy dialogue or simply ignored. And the final act is simply baffling.... killing any atmosphere that remained and leaving you wondering if you could have got a drink in 30 minutes earlier.

Let’s say now this is the starkest, maddest, most demented, most brilliant film to have come round in a long while. The script puts most modern playwrights to shame for its obsessive reworking of its themes. The camera work reveals the inadequacy of most modern film-making. Every scene is important, the whole shaped in such a way as to confront us with the material. Day-Lewis’s performance as Daniel Plainview is searing and riveting, his voice leonine and cruel, his language and manner overbearing, his syntax oppressive and domineering.

The trailer promises a narrative build of intensity: there will be greed, there will be revenge, there will be blood. And we get that promised blood. The metaphors seep and leak in to the governing image of the film: liquid. A weird meditation on liquid drives the film: it is everywhere – there’s the blood sprayed early in the film on Day-Lewis’s face at the braining of the nameless worker whose son (‘HW’) he legally or illegally inherits (and adopts by anointing him with a daubing of his preferred liquid, oil); the goat’s milk and salty water of the Sunday ranch which Plainview aims to buy at “quail prices”; the alcohol which laces little deafened HW’s milk; the cleansing salty sea itself; the oil which bubbles or gushes or forces its way out of the ground; the dirty water which naturally rises to fill the shallow grave in which Plainview buries his murder victim; the clean water – viscous as baby oil – in which Plainview is hypocritically baptised; the alcohol which fuels the savage ending; and the culminating madness of the returning motif of the goat’s milk in Day-Lewis’s hysterical, simultaneously imitable and inimitable roar, “I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE.”

The whole film is a joy to watch, rich and intense and brazen. One scene can stand as metaphor for its driving passion. The oil has been struck. It gushes in to the night sky in a huge biblical tower of flame. The camera shifts to frame Day-Lewis and Ciaran Hinds as his second-in-command (the whole cast is excellent). Day-Lewis is left of screen, his body bent and twisted with the physical endurance of the work leading to this moment, but roaring with delight, his face and clothes bathed in oil, his moustache just another dripping black smear on his face. Hinds stands to right of screen, worn out but upright, clean, looking askance at this monster from another world who is next to him. He walks off. People cannot endure what Day-Lewis’s character chooses to endure in this film. His best actor Academy Award was thoroughly deserved.

JCM 18 Apr 2008

An unforgettable and devastating film, There Will Be Blood is unsettlingly and strange, and all the more so for being a grown up film which doesn't offer explanations and award come-uppances to its characters. It's a parable about greed and loneliness with a feeling of bleak inevitability to its ultimate violence. Do believe the hype! This is the best thing that Paul Thomas Anderson has done.

HW 18 Mar 2008