Mick LaSalle SF Chronicle 1/4/2008 “Conquering the West, and getting His hands dirty in the process”
Anyone who cares about the art of movies will eventually have to see, contend with and make a decision about "There Will Be Blood," and that in itself constitutes a kind of recommendation. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson challenges audience expectations, makes unexpected and bizarre choices - sometimes for the sake of making them - and almost brings off a picture worthy of his grandiose ambition.
Ambition counts for something. Instead of doing miniatures, Anderson is attempting work on an epic scale. Talent counts, too. There's pleasure in just watching Anderson work. Take the scene in which the self-described "oilman," Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), offers his services at a California town meeting. Anderson chooses to film most of the scene with a medium shot of Plainview. He resists cutting to Plainview's audience, and so Plainview becomes the center of our universe. Everyone besides him becomes unimportant and vaguely surreal - a replication of the character's own psychological point of view.
Though Anderson's talent and ambition are striking, there's also the matter of how that talent is used. By the finish, Anderson stops celebrating and luxuriating in Plainview's audacity and starts wallowing in his own. "There Will Be Blood" derails into grand gestures and deliberate perversity. The finish is not quite as bad as having Anderson pop out from behind the curtain to announce the previous two hours have been a joke. But it's close enough to rob "There Will Be Blood" of any impact, besides that which is focused on the director - a kind of "wow, could you believe he did that!"
This is a shame, because for most of the way the film is an effective and seemingly straightforward piece, inflected by Anderson's shrewd stylistic touches (like having Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood compose the soundtrack) and by his visionary capacity for the big canvas. The first scenes are without dialogue and could be transposed into a silent film. It's 1898, and Plainview is mining for silver. He's the great American entrepreneur, the ambitious loner, pushing farther west and pushing himself to his physical limits. Later he's drilling for oil, and by the time we first hear him speak, he's already a self-made success. The voice itself comes as a surprise, the first of the film's eccentric choices. Day-Lewis goes through the film imitating John Huston. Maybe it's a reference to Huston's tycoon role in "Chinatown," or a secondhand acknowledgment of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," a movie about gold prospectors that starred Huston's father, Walter Huston. In any case, the imitation creates a distancing effect, even for those unfamiliar with John Huston's voice. Day-Lewis is unable to rope that speech around a coherent characterization, and so the character remains more a concept than an identifiable personality. That this was surely Anderson's intention doesn't make it a smart idea.
"There Will Be Blood" is good at presenting the West as a land of mystery and dangerous power, and the scenes in which oil explodes from the ground in magnificent and frightening release are not to be missed. Plainview, a monster of confidence and fearlessness, is just the man to harness these natural forces, and in the early scenes Anderson takes to presenting him in an eerie tableau, with his young son (Dillon Freasier), standing calm and mute at his side. The presence of the prince makes Plainview look all the more like a king, and his relationship with the son forms one of the film's most satisfying and complex threads.
When towns are growing and wealth is being created, power struggles are inevitable, but Plainview has only one rival in his world - a sanctimonious preacher, Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano. The uneasy interaction between God and secular commerce is the film's most important recurring notion. It's where "There Will Be Blood" could have had something definite and compelling to say, but instead it's precisely there that we find the film's Achilles' heel. Anderson doesn't take the religious mind seriously enough to understand it, leaving Dano to play a generalized character who is somewhere between a freak and a phony. The scenes between Day-Lewis and Dano ultimately degenerate into a ridiculous circus.
Still, individual scenes and sequences - for example, the entire section in which Plainview gets to know his "long lost" brother - are too strange, haunting and emotionally right for the film to be dismissed. There should be no attempt or temptation to dismiss it. At the same time, there should be no need to pretend "There Will Be Blood" is a masterpiece just because Anderson sincerely tried to make it one. Peter Travers Rolling Stone 1/18/2008 There Will Be Blood
The first time I saw this beautiful beast of a movie from director-writer Paul Thomas Anderson, I felt gut-punched. Some people winced during the first fifteen minutes of wordless darkness as Daniel Day-Lewis, deep in a mineshaft in the choking heat of New Mexico, painstakingly digs silver ore out of stubborn rock. Such is the relentless intensity of his character, Daniel Plainview. An ankle-snapping fall down the shaft leaves a lifelong limp but no change in his ramrod ambition, even as oil replaces silver as is unholy grail. As the film bores through the first three decades of the twentieth century, Plainview becomes a California oil tycoon of unparalleled ruthlessness. His enemies are man and God. And in the film's final section, rush of scorching brutality, Plainview takes his revenge on both. His last words burst forth with biblical exultation: "I'm finished."
That initial viewing damn near finished me. Day-Lewis, no ifs, ands or buts, gives one of the great elemental performances in modern cinema. Yet what kind of sympathy could we find for the devil he's playing? Seeing There Will Be Blood is like going ten rounds with a raging bull. You feel so pummeled it's hard to get your head clear.
Make the effort. What throws you at first glance emerges, after you put the film back together in your head, as a master plan. Anderson is an artful renegade who restores your faith in the harsh power of movies. This is his bloody and brilliant Citizen Kane. He hasn't so much adapted Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil as cherry-picked it for a structure. Social history isn't his concern. He's out to show how violence of the flesh and the spirit is hard-wired into the American character. Like Charles Foster Kane, Daniel Plainview is the dark underside of the American success story, or, if you want to extend the metaphor, of America itself. He rapes and pillages in the name of progress and winds up estranged from the human species he has long ago forgotten to call his own.
My advice to approaching There Will Be Blood is to sit back and let it engulf you. Day- Lewis' resonant voice is a potent magnet. Plainview salivates for California land that sits on oceans of oil. Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) leads Plainview to his father's goat farm, an easy mark until Paul's younger brother, the preacher Eli Sunday (also Dano), puts religion directly in Plainview's path. The ensuing battle between the ignorant armies of greed and bogus evangelism powers the film. All praise to the baby-faced Dano (L.I.E., Little Miss Sunshine) for bringing sly cunning and unexpected ferocity to Plainview's most formidable opponent.
Unlike Kane, Plainview has no Rosebud, a sentimental totem of his lost youth. But he does have H.W., an infant he adopts when the boy's father dies in a well accident. The baby brings him as close as he ever comes to love. By the time H.W. is nine, and played by the extraordinary Dillon Freasier, Plainview is using him as a shill. Nothing like the illusion of family values to fool the suckers. But H.W.'s deafness (he sat too close to an exploding oil well) makes him a liability. Plainview ships him off to school until he finds a new way to exploit him. Amazingly, the connection between the two is never in doubt. Such is the skill of Day-Lewis and Freasier.
The look of the film is equally astonishing, with production designer Jackisk creating a makeshift world out of the shacks and derricks that dot the landscape. Shot in Marfa, Texas (home to Giant and No Country for Old Men), the film moves from the primitive to corrupt civilization in the style ofMcCabe and Mrs. Miller, a classic from Anderson's mentor, the late Robert Altman. And if you want proof that cinematography can be an art form, behold the brute force of the images captured by Robert Elswit, a genius of camera and lighting who can make visual poetry out of black smoke and an oil well consumed by flame.
Sound is also crucial, even in its absence, to reflect H.W.'s silent world. And the score by Radiohead guitarist and composer Jonny Greenwood is revolutionary, a sonic explosion that reinvents what movie music can be. From the editing, by Dylan Tichenor, to the costumes, by Mark Bridges, There Will Be Blood raises the bar on putting technique at the service of character.
And it's to the character of Plainview — always moody, often drunk and probably impotent — that we return in horrified fascination. He softens with the arrival of Henry (the superb Kevin J. O'Connor), who claims toe his half-brother. But Plainview is no fan of mankind: "I look at people and I see nothing worth liking." After a bracing swim in the Pacific, Plainview turns on Henry for a purported lie and unleashes his fury.
Still, for getting under Daniel's skin, no one beats Eli. Each has humiliated the other in public — Plainview slapping Eli for being a fake healer, and Eli returning the blows later as Plainview, who views God as a superstition, agrees to a baptism to gain land. When the two confront each other for the last time in the film's harrowing climax — the false prophet to blackmail the hermit misanthrope in the mansion greed built — all bloody hell breaks loose. Some insist this sequence, set in a bowling alley in Plainview's basement, is the moment the film jumps the shark and leaves the plot choking on excess and illogic. For me, it's the blunt instrument that completes the puzzle and raises the specters of oil and fanaticism that till fuel our headlines. Let the arguments begin.
There can be no debate about Day-Lewis. "Gargantuan" is a puny word to describe his landmark performance. Try "electrifying" or "volcanic" or anything else that sounds dangerous if you get too close. His triumph is in taking us see ourselves in Plainview, no matter how much we want to turn away. Day-Lewis and Anderson — a huge talent with an uncompromising gift for language and composition — are out to batter every cliché Hollywood holds near. There Will Be Blood hits with hurricane force. Lovers of formula and sugarcoating will hate it. In terms of excitement, imagination and rule-busting experimentation, it's a gusher.