There Will Be Blood Movie Review - Cheshire Cat Studios

There Will Be Blood is so damn good I just had to drop what few reviews I was actually in the process of doing in order to praise this intriguing piece of film.

The movie was one that I had only heard about. There had been talks about a Metal Gear Solid movie being directed by 'the director of There Will Be Blood', and several movie critic sites I enjoy had given the movie high praises. With the critics raving about this 'under the radar' movie, I figured I would buy a copy and see what the craze was about.

Set in the early 1900's, There Will Be Blood loosely based on the book "Oil!" by Upton Sinclair. The movie begins with 15 minutes of watching the meager and dangerous beginnings of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), and his start as an oil prospector. The first 15 minutes is silent, save for a few grunts and groans from when Plainview falls into a shaft and breaks his leg. You watch as Plainview builds his first crude oil derek, and how he adopts the orphaned son of one of the workers killed in a drilling accident. While this sounds extremely dry (and this movie may be boring to action junkies like myself) my ADHD eyes were fixated on what was probably one of the best silent performances I've seen for a long while. The ability to adequately tell a story without a single word is truly remarkable in this day and age; however finding an audience that will appreciate it is even more amazing.

As the movie jumps roughly ten years into the future, you come to realize that this humble oil prospector is less than noble. Daniel Plainview is a wolf in sheep's clothing, a charmer who uses his father-and-son image and 'plain talk' to convince farmers and ranchers that they should let him drill on their land. He promises the ranchers and farmers that, with his equipment, their small communities will not only survive, but thrive from the economy he will help them create. However, behind closed doors, Plainview blatantly admits that, underneath his 'plain speaking' and 'family man' image, he hates all people and that when he makes his fortune he simply wants to get away from everybody else. He trusts no one and he is willing to do the unspeakable in order to build his fortune.

I wouldn't say that the character of Daniel Plainview is necessarily 'evil', but he is conceited, paranoid at times, and he obviously has some sort of competitive disorder, a blind ambition that drives him straight into the mouth of madness. His competitive nature drives him further down a Citizen Kane-esque road to ruin as vividly portrayed with his power struggle against Eli Sunday over the California town of Little Boston.

Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) is a teenage preacher in the small California town of Little Boston. Eli's twin brother, Paul, left the rest of his family and sold Plainview the information about the untapped oil beneath his family's ranch. Posing as quail hunters, Plainview and his adopted son scout the Sunday ranch for signs of oil. When the results prove positive, Daniel Plainview attempts to hustle the land from the Sunday family so that 'his sick son can get fresh air and hunt quail'. However, Eli is wise to Plainview's true intentions and begins bargaining the price of his father's ranch with an increasingly enraged Plainview. The two finally agree on a price, plus a hefty bonus for Eli's church, The Church of the Third Revelation.

Viewing the drilling as an opportunity to become the equivalent of a town-elder, Eli Sunday does everything in his power to establish his church, from inquiring whether the new main road will run by the church, to asking that he be the one to bless Plainview's new oil derek, to harassing Plainview about the money he promised to donate to the church. Eli and his fellow church members also begin to solicit Plainview's workers at the work site and The Church of the Third Revelation begins to grow. After Plainview blesses the oil derek himself (using some of the verbiage Eli had intended to have used for himself), it becomes painfully obvious that the two are now in somewhat private war over who will be the Big Dog in Little Boston.

Eli Sunday's character is nothing short of one of the phony 'false prophets' you see on television screaming "BE HEALED!" and slapping the shit out of some poor crippled person, blaming their medical illnesses on evil spirits and devils. Shit, the crippled people are getting out of their wheelchairs because the ahead of them ended up looking like Rihanna after the Grammys. "Church of Christ Brown, motherfuckas!"

"Let us pray the Pimp's Prayer. Lord, please pray for the soul of this bitch and guide my pimp hand and make it strong, Lord, so that she might learn a ho's place. Amen."
(Hate mail can be directed here)

Paul Dano's portrayal of a very passionate and dramatic 'TV Evangelist' made my skin crawl because it was so damned good. As he gave his sermon to an elderly woman, promising to vanquish the Devil from her arthritic hands while screaming and spitting and swinging into the air like a lunatic, I honestly began to fear the character on my screen. It reminded me of some of the fanatics I've not only met, but are related to, and my uneasiness I feel when they get into such a crazed state of mind. It was that powerful.

However THE most powerful moment of the entire movie has to be the scene where Daniel Plainview (in order to get permission to build a pipeline through one rancher's land) is required to get baptised at his church. Of course, his church just happens to be The Church of the Third Revelation. Plainview must not only suffer from the whims of Eli Summer during his baptism, but he must confess his sins aloud to the townspeople, as well as himself. Fighting Eli's humiliations until the very end, the one sin that truely conflicts Plainview causes his emotional breakdown. In the end, Plainview can do little else but reassure himself that he is confessing himself solely for his oil pipeline.

The movie, while featuring strong characters thanks to strong actors, can feel slightly underdeveloped at times. Some parts, such as Plainview's relationship with his adopted son, are not as clearly developed as the director probably had hoped. While there is some emotional development between characters, most of it is implied rather than explored, and it can hurt a movie that focuses on drama. Also the pacing of the movie is extremely irregular, with long scenes that I felt could probably have been shortened to keep a little pacing. The prime example is when Plainview's oil derek catches fire and this very intense scene is quelled with a long pause of Plainview sitting and watching it burn. I can understand WHY they added that scene at the end, but I don't understand why they made it last so damned long.

The one element to the film that stands out is the musical score, which has an extremely ethereal and 'unreal' vibe to it. You would expect 'Olde Time' music along the lines of the "O' Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack for a movie set in the rural 1900's, but instead you get this almost hypnotic mish-mash of acoustic guitar and irregular beats that sounds closer to an early Nine Inch Nails music video than a drama set in the early 20th century. I guess the only way to describe the music is to say that the soundtrack was by Jonny Greenwood of the band Radiohead. Still, the music seems to do its job and draw a person into (what I can only assume is) the twisted mindset of Daniel Plainview.

OVERALL

If you are looking for an action packed film or a good Western movie, you probably won't find what you are looking for with There Will Be Blood. If you like movies like Twilight and Transformers (MEANING YOU HAVE NO CLUE WHAT A GOOD MOVIE IS) then this movie is DEFINATELY not for you. For everyone else, be warned that the movie can move at a snail's pace at times, and then spike with a huge dramatic or action-packed moment only to get slow immediately afterwards.

However, if you can honestly enjoy slower paced movies that focus on character portrayals and great acting, I think you will be entertained with the movie.

Paul Anderson?

After being blown away by the acting and the story in There Will Be Blood, I sat through a few minutes of the credits to see who a few of the actors were when I saw the dreaded ‘Directed and Adapted to Screen by Paul Thomas Anderson’.

Paul Anderson? You mean the director of Aliens vs Predator, Mortal Kombat and the Resident Evil movies? (Actually, for mindless entertainment, I still enjoy Mortal Kombat, even if it is an Enter the Dragon knock off…) Paul Anderson, the guy who is one step above Uwe Boll on the video game movie shit-o-meter, directed There Will Be Blood? IMPOSSIBLE!

I immediately rushed off to my computer and onto IMDB to see with my own eyes whether or not Paul Anderson had indeed redeemed himself as a director.

However, it turns out that there are TWO Paul Andersons directing movies these days: Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of There Will Be Blood, and Paul W. S. Anderson, the video-game-to-movie director that sits comfortably above Uwe Boll (Bloodrayne, Alone in the Dark, House of the Dead) and under Christophe Gans (Silent Hill, Brotherhood of the Wolf).

I was relieved to learn that Paul W. s. Anderson wasn’t some kind of ‘hidden genius’ and I immediately snuffed out my initial idea of buying more of his movies. It would have sucked donkey dick if I had actually gone out and bought Resident Evil: Extinction in hopes of finding some hidden brilliance in it. My relief was on par with being hinted to that there was a gold coin in a septic tank, but before you took the plunge you were assured that there was nothing of value within.