Punch-Drunk-Blood!

Rating: 4/10 (4 August 2010)

Two-thirds of the way through 'There Will Be Blood', it suddenly dawned on me that writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson must be a film student from "The longer the movie, the more seriously i'll be taken!" school of thinking. 'Important' film critics seem to lap up lengthy, historical epics as if they're objects that contain the meaning of life within, and judging by their hysterically over-positive reaction, they must have thought all of their Christmas' had come at once when this self-important ogre first came tumbling over the horizon.
Despite pretensions alluring to an allegory of the Iraqi war, there isn't any story so to speak of other than a series of Mexican standoffs between a piece of pork (Day Lewis' thoroughly unpleasant oil-baron-to-be, Daniel Plainview) and a rash of bacon (Dano's equally unpleasant, charlatan preacher, Eli Sunday) who indulge in a self-serving handbags at dawn spat over some black liquid spillage in New Mexico circa 1898.
These hammy confrontations are very entertaining and the two actors cheerfully chew the scenery for all their worth - but by god! - without them it would be interminable, as the sliver thin plot (adapted from a book no one's ever heard of, let alone read) is dragged out over TWO-AND-THREE-QUARTER-HOURS!!!
In between Lewis & Dano's colourful interludes are vast, vacuous chasms containing some beige mountains, a crushingly obtrusive score by Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood and a disgracefully wasted Cirian Hinds, who has almost literally nothing to say or do for the whole movie. He's not alone however, as this elephantine husk has plenty more squandered opportunities waiting up it's flabby sleeve.
A number of scenes whet your appetite for some great drama, but ultimately deflate you by fizzling out into nothing. Too often Anderson places the despicable Plainview into circumstances where his self-obsession threatens emotional fireworks & nitty-gritty theatrics, and too often they're just left dangling in thin-air and end up head butting a dramatic cul-de-sac brick wall instead.
The segment involving the sudden appearance of Plainview's (alleged) younger brother, Henry (Kevin J O'connor), could have been an exception to this rule as it contains a beginning, middle and (very sticky) end. But Anderson executes it with such an arrogant disregard for timing and pace, that it ends up getting crushed pancake-flat beneath a cliff-face of tedium.
Even the final scene takes the wind out of the sails of expectation on account of it just being plain daft. Time Out magazine commented that " the climax contains the lunacy of 'Dr Strangelove' and 'A Clockwork Orange'" which it does and, taken on it's own terms, it is (in a Monty Python kinda-way) actually quite funny. Yet, it's absurdly at odds with everything preceding it, leaving us by contrast with a silly, puny looking pay-off.
Stylistically speaking, TWBB is at least free of the embarrassing Scorsese aping traits found in 'Boogie Nights' & 'Magnolia', and Roger Elswitt's sobering lens work is very fine indeed. On the other hand though, those two movies did at least contain a sense of life and (whisper it) fun, in their bones. So even though they unravelled into a big pile of nothing at the halfway mark, they did (if only for a short time) make a game attempt at proper audience engagement. TWBB just splutters & spurts on it's back for a third of the duration and spends the rest of it's time sound asleep. More likely than not, so will you.
Lurking somewhere within this Death Star sized suet-pudding, is a lean, decent little movie trying to fight it's way out - a taut chamber piece that could have set the world on fire. But it wasn't to be. PTA obviously believed there should be excessive width to 'enhance' the quality and ends up gorging his baby into obesity, boring us sh*tless as a result. Much much less, could have been so much more.