Overcooked Masterpiece

Rating: 6/10 (3 February 2008)

This movie is almost a one-man show. And that one man is Daniel Day-Lewis.
At first I thought I was watching a silent movie. The background story of Daniel Plainsview's humble beginning as a silver miner who got lucky hitting an oil deposit and how he adopted the infant son of a worker who got killed in the mine (whom he named HW), was all told in images and music, no dialogue. You knew you were in for a different type of movie. The first words were said only thirty minutes or so into the movie.
This is one of those epic (2 hrs. and 40 minutes, but it certainly felt longer than that) movies about oil. "Giant" with James Dean immediately comes to mind, but this movie did not have the gentility of Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor. This movie is as dirty and grimy, and ruthless as it gets.
Essentially it depicted how Daniel (with HW in tow) sweet-talks his way with the simple backward folk in order to cheaply get their oil-blessed property. Then, problems arose when Daniel did not want his oil well blessed by the young preacher Eli. From there, misfortunes started to happen, worst of which was when HW suffered total deafness because of an oil rig explosion. Daniel's life was never the same after that. Towards the end, he was a broken drunk rich man, with plenty of unresolved conflict within him, that results in tragic consequences.
I have liked DDL ever since he played the genteel Cecil in "A Room With A View". Now, more than 20 years later, DDL is really in an acting tour-de-force in "There Will Be Blood". However, I must say that this acting was also flawed in a way. It started out really well, DDL was really very good in those early scenes as an oil speculator. But when religion came into the picture, I felt his acting went over the top, as if it was for a stage play. There was a scene when he had to submit himself to joining the church of Eli, subjecting himself to a "throwing out the demons" ceremony in order to get access to a piece of land. And then there was that scene in the end where he used milkshakes as a metaphor for how he had been able to get oil was a case of too much self-conscious acting. The over-acting in these scenes, not only by DDL, but also Paul Dano (who played preacher Eli), was almost humorous in its excess.
I liked this one better than "No Country For Old Men" as it had more substance and structure by its writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (of "Magnolia" fame). The cinematography was very impressive. The camera work and editing of that big scene of the fateful oil rig explosion that made HW deaf was also very good. The musical score was something else. There was no sweeping music as you would expect from epics like that of "Dances With Wolves". Instead there were these seemingly unrelated pieces of music, that do not seem to be appropriate to the scene. It felt experimental in a way. It was interesting though. This movie was clearly trying to be a cinematic masterpiece, but I think its efforts are too obvious and obtrusive. Not bad by any measure, but I think it went a little overboard.