Like watching a man attend his own funeral

Rating: 6/10 (1 February 2008)

There is no denying that DDL is a superlative actor, capable of delivering a 125% commitment to any character he takes on. This is a given. His performance in There Will Be Blood is indisputably stupendous, and he does deserve the Oscar he no doubt will receive later in the month.
That being said, this doesn't make the movie all that great; it's hardly perfect and hardly the masterpiece so many critics are deeming it to be. For a film to be truly great, you have to have a brilliant concept going in, and said concept must then be brilliantly executed. I think this film had a very good concept but its overall flaws lie in the execution. Haven't read the source material (the novel by Sinclair) but I do think there is enough of a grand story here to warrant a better execution.
Some films give the viewer too much information on the characters, which generally leads to triteness and loss of edge; others give too little. There Will Be Blood, for me, falls into this second category: we are never given enough background detail, or - even worse - enough CURRENT detail, to have the Daniel Plainview character fleshed out enough to even begin to understand him on anything other than a superficial level. All we are given to work with is an empty shell of a man, with hatred for himself at his deepest core, and that hatred festers from the inside, until he is, by the end of the movie, a drunken rotted-out, still-breathing corpse. He has monetary success, sure, but with no one to share it with, it is meaningless.
The battle of egos between the Eli preacher character and Daniel is at the root of the film, and this was played out in a very intriguing way, the question being, which one of them is actually phonier, more psychotic and more evil?
Partway through the film we know that Daniel, who at one point submits himself to an act of vile and ridiculously overplayed humiliation at Eli's hands, will be getting revenge. Therefore, the ending that so many people have found to be surprising came as no surprise to me; it was the only possible way the movie could conclude, in fact. The ending was not as powerful as it could have been because I just didn't feel Daniel's character deteriorate the way he obviously had as depicted in the 1927 sequence. There's a character that shows up halfway through, who tries to pass himself off as Daniel's brother (from a different mother); this character turns out to be nothing more than a plot device, a person to whom Daniel speaks of his true nature - it's not enough for him to succeed, he reveals, he's not happy unless others fail. He hates nearly everyone and cannot wait to make enough dough so he can get away from them all, blah blah blah. From then on, his character becomes more openly hateful, but we never really FEEL this happening from the inside of the man. This bugged me.
The most frustrating part of the film is Daniel's relationship with his son (or the boy he apparently chooses to adopt as his own, not really sure how this worked). At the beginning, we see him showing what appears to be genuine affection for him, but this deteriorates so quickly that it just didn't seem valid. I think a little more subtle nuance in Anderson's writing was called for - this would have elevated the film to possible mythic status, right up there, say, with No Country For Old Men although I hate to compare.