Powerful anti-success story

Rating: Null/10 (12 February 2008)

Adding my praise to director Anderson and especially thespians Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Dano, I have a couple of reactions to There Will Be Blood that hopefully are not repetitive or redundant.
First of all, growing up and addicted to the TV movie packages, my favorite film genre was a subset of the popular Warner Bros. 1930s movies. Edward G. Robinson starred in many vehicles which had an almost rubber-stamped, surefire format: he was a self-made man who rose to the top in the first few reels, only to reveal numerous tragic flaws that brought him down down down to oblivion by the fadeout. Never a happy ending, but always extremely satisfying to watch his familiar arc -enjoy his heady success, and learn (esp. for a youngster like me) from his tremendous errors. Everybody knows Little Caesar, but more typical for E.G. Robinson were the films Silver Dollar (he gets ruined by the Gold Standard); I Loved a Woman (E.G. as unscrupulous Meat Packing magnate); Dark Hazard (about dog racing); and others.
There Will Be Blood is the first film I've seen in a long time that brings back this format, though of course much harder edged than in the 1930s. Daniel Day Lewis is quite a different actor than Robinson, but both faultlessly engender sympathy for their characters, even when the fictional guys are doing reprehensible things.
The other issue came up this weekend when I mentioned There Will Be Blood to a friend who said she hadn't seen it because she heard it contained "gratuitous violence". I immediately looked it up and the dictionary defines gratuitous as "unwarranted". The debate over gratuitous violence is certain to continue for a long time, but I don't believe the violence is unwarranted in There Will Be Blood. And recall the previous epicenter of this debate, Sam Peckinpah, who in his ongoing opposition to the Vietnam war was outspoken in his wish to "rub our noses in it" when he staged the memorably violent scenes in his films of that period, notably Straw Dogs and The Wild Bunch. The central theme of Straw Dogs was the Territorial Imperative, a theme very well handled by Anderson in There Will Be Blood.