Bombastic but empty

Rating: 5/10 (2 March 2008)

"There Will Be Blood" is impressive on some levels. Set pieces such as the oil well fire are handled with eerie, remote precision and weird alienating music that bring Kubrick to mind. In fact the chilliness and sudden, jolting brutality of the movie are very late Kubrick. Still, great an actor as Daniel Day Lewis is, his character here is revealed right away -- greedy, egotistical, unstoppable -- and never grows or deviates, so the role is not a vehicle for a great performance. Day Lewis delivers an all-stops-out, bug-eyed, mannered, finally monotonous performance. It's the centerpiece of a film that finally seems uninterested in exploring human or social issues, preferring to go grandiose on us and trumping up (it's apparently not in the book) a metaphysical duel to the death between Day Lewis' oilman and Paul Dano's preacher (another over-the-top performance). It finally rings hollow, schematic, humorless, lifeless. This is a film made with amazing skill and care and control, but like the late Kubrick films you're left wondering why. One hopes that Paul Thomas Anderson isn't turning into the kind of hermetic obsessive Kubrick became, losing touch with humanity and making ponderous films about abstractions. So unlike "Boogie Nights"!
The film is dedicated to the late Robert Altman. Perhaps Anderson should have viewed Altman's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" again. There's an exploration of American capitalist greed that makes "There Will Be Blood" feel...bloodless.