CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Review of There Will Be Blood

Friday, October 03, 2008

this entry brought to you by modest mouse, "tiny cities made of ashes"





Every time I see a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, I feel like I'm missing something. I want to like his movies far more than I actually do. I enjoyed Boogie Nights but thought the first half, in the 70s, was far superior to the second half, in the 80s, which dragged too long and wasn't as emotionally interesting. Magnolia was an interesting character study and I ultimately liked it, but it felt like the indulgence of a director who knows how talented he is; it was way too long, and had two characters who weren't at all interesting, and could've been cut entirely. There was also the ending, which seemed oddly incongruous, and representative of something I didn't get, despite, again wanting to.

There Will Be Blood felt the same way, although its length was never a problem. I found the long, deliberate, ponderous pace to be mesmerizing. Paul Thomas Anderson is an actor's director, meaning he manages to universally get the best performances out of his actors-- there's no weak link here, and nothing stumbles. Daniel Day Lewis is absolutely dripping with his character, oil baron Daniel Plainview, who is, to put it simply, a despicable, unsympathetic man. Paul Dano, the fresh-faced teen from Little Miss Sunshine is eclectic and over-the-top as a manic, evangelical preacher who is possibly a shyster. Though Dano isn't in the movie as much as the press implies, their two characters instantly have a very interesting chemistry, and watching the two of them get the best of one another is absolute storytelling gold. It should also be stated that the film is so gorgeously, enthrallingly photographed, it will doubtlessly be taught in film school for ages, up among the greats. This movie is absolutely breathtakingly gorgeous, and along with the acting and the crisp script, there seems little to complain about while watching the film. It's positively enthralling.

And yet, when I came away from the movie, I felt like I didn't entirely understand it. I felt like I was missing something that those who were saying this was the best movie of the year somehow got. Plainview is ruthless and vile, to be sure, and never over-the-top so. Plainview isn't a supervillain; he is rooted in reality, and you can see his concerns and motivations as they're happening, the way you might an Enron executive if you actually knew him well enough to defend him as a person if not a businessman. But with a title like There Will Be Blood, Enron was exactly what I was expecting-- I was expecting villagers' lives to be uprooted, death and starving in its wake. When the real oil barons came through the west with their thirst for money and power at the turn of the 20th century, there were more than just a few dead bodies; children were killed, families forced to move out of their homes; it was like lands being razed at times. It's not that Plainview isn't ruthless, I just felt like he wasn't nearly as ruthless as other real oil barons at the time; not nearly as ruthless as he could have been.

There Will Be Blood seems to be a character study on the worst kind of human being, yet it wouldn't be hard to imagine a man even worse that, again, never goes into cartoonish supervillain territory. The movie also ends on an odd beat; much like No Country For Old Men, the credits here roll before you expect them, the last line of dialog open to interpretation. And yet while I did feel like I'd learned as much about this man as I needed to know, with P.T. Anderson's ending to his previous movie, Magnolia coming out of nowhere and seeming like more of an effort to end bewilderingly, this too seemed like an ending for art's sake, rather than a natural ending. I bought it in the case of No Country For Old Men, which I felt like was a whirlwind of a movie that ended abruptly because going on wouldn't have kept the movie's inertia going, here I feel like it's at the indulgence of Anderson himself. All this, of course, isn't to say that I disliked There Will Be Blood-- I liked it a lot, in fact. But there felt like something I was expecting of the movie that it didn't necessarily give me, and it left me feeling a bit off balance. There was blood, yes, both in the literal sense and the philosophical sense. But shouldn't there have been more?
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with love from CRS @ 8:03 AM 

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