there will be blood sausage....

Rating: 3/10 (6 November 2008)

Ten years from now, people will be wondering what the Academy, or anyone, saw in this film. It's really that awful. But it manages to coat its awfulness in a glossy veneer of style, and to buttress its vacuous plot with big-budget production values. And it mounts a full-frontal assault on Hollywood's twin bugaboos, religion and capitalismwhich makes it oh so chic.
The traditional Hollywood potboiler achieves its effect by insisting on a moral universe that rewards the good and punishes the bad through all sorts of coincidences, distortions, glib inferences and clumsy symbolism. If that is true, then this movie must be seen as the absolute antithesis of the typical Hollywood potboiler. It insists on an amoral universe that exhaustively punishes the good (or morally neutral, e.g. nature) and rewards the bad through the absence of coincidence, meaning, pattern, or symbolism. In the real world, Daniel Plainview would have been shot less than 30 minutes into the film and the grateful settlers would have erected a statue to the assassin's honorand those events would have transpired not necessarily as an illustration of divine justice, but simply as an expression of social utility. "There Will Be Blood" is as unnatural and contrived as "Die Hard," just a lot less fun.
While watching this ghastly spectacle, I kept thinking about other "dark" films, films which posit the total absence of any transcendent good or moral order. Even "Reservoir Dogs" contains the leavening of humor, as does "No Country for Old Men." These, among many others, have created the equivalent of a moral vacuum into which the void-filling substance of dark laughter has insinuated itself. Not so with ".....Blood." There is not a single moment of humor in this film, unless you count the unintended humor of the final sequence when Satan attempts to kill his disciple with bowling balls (they might as well have been custard pies). Plainview doesn't just hate the world; unlike Anton Chiggurh, he hates himself and all his works. His is a self-devouring sickness that might be interesting as the frozen embodiment of a theological principle, but utterly fails in a dramatic context.
Which brings one to Daniel Day-Lewis' performance. Daniel Day-Lewis is a great and gifted actor, and with a better script he probably could have made the character genuinely terrifying. As it is, we are treated to a mustache-twirling cartoon of evil who delivers his wooden lines with unvarying literalness. This must have been a conscious choice by the directoras was the refusal to offer us any glimpse into the whys or wherefores of Plainview's sociopathy, or any semblance of character development. Plainview begins as a cipher and ends as a malignant cipher. The only sympathy he elicits is through his early, apparent concern for his sona sympathy which is completely dissipated by the unmotivated and unconvincing disavowal of that same "son" at the end of the film. This was the final straw for me: a director so utterly imprisoned by ego that he could throw away a casual, probably unintended residue of meaning to achieve the seamless nihilism of his overarching vision.
I give this film 3 stars for the excellent use of natural settings and its competent, if uninspired, cinematography. The use of non-diegetic music, both the Brahms violin concerto and Arvo Part's "Tabula Rasa" as well as the loud, brazen mau-mau ostinati meant to accompany Plainview's sorties through the moral wasteland (Ugh. Ugh. Me Big Malefactor) showed a complete insensitivity to the melding of musical and visual rhythms. Maybe he should have studied "2001" a little more.
Ugh, indeed.....