Frustrating

Rating: 5/10 (2 March 2008)

I was eager to see this film for months but my wife had no interest. Finally, I got a free Sunday to take in this film after reading innumerable reviews calling it an instant "classic" and "masterpiece." I kept hearing about this "descent into evil" that we are supposed to witness in Daniel Plainview, and I expected that, in a film entitled "There Will Be Blood," there would be blood. I was anticipating a convincing transformation from mere ambition to amorality, in the manner of Michael Corleone - in my opinion, The Godfather Parts 1-2 are my gold standard for a charismatic hero tragically brought down by hubris and greed, devolving before the viewers' eyes until the same character we admire in the beginning becomes truly horrific and despicable. In Corleone's case, he clings to an internally consistent logic in his behavior - defense of family honor and loyalty to the larger cause. In the case of Daniel Day-Lewis' Plainview, we see no such (d)evolution. Instead, we hear an audio assault of TOTALLY inappropriately dramatic violin and percussion spasms which bear no relationship to the events unfolding on the screen, while we watch DDL brilliantly inhabit a character who instills in us a sense of dread about what is going to happen ... except ... it never quite does. While I sat engrossed in the lines and stubble of DDL's weary face and kept trying to anticipate what event would mark the dramatic turning point that leads Plainview to make his tragic choices, that point never arrives. For reasons never clear or logically portrayed, Plainview develops an enormous hatred for Eli the preacher that is far out of proportion to any real encounter that could explain the animus. All of a sudden he beats the preacher up but even that scene plays more comically than forebodingly. While DDL made me believe from the outset that his character was capable of a transformation to extreme violence and hatred, I never fully understood what would ultimately motivate them - his adopted son's accident and inability to continue as a partner and heir to his business? A teenaged charlatan preacher who embodies the worst of hypocrisy in organized religion? A big-oil representative who insults Plainview's parenting skills? A scam artist masquerading as the half-brother we have no reason to believe Plainview would ever have known or cared about otherwise? What the heck is going on here? Plainview lashes out, perhaps from the same frustration the viewer is feeling, at the pointlessness of it all. After reading media reviews about DDL's menacing performance as a "murderous" oilman, I was extremely disappointed that his two acts of murder seem like such exaggerated responses to minimal injustices suffered by Plainview. At least in the case of a Michael Corleone or a Bill the Butcher, we can understand what it is that causes the antihero to become a frank villain - in Plainview's case, it is plainly not in view. Thus do all of DDL's amazing talents ultimately go to waste in pursuit of a nonstory.
The cinematography was superb and the pacing, slow as it is, could have been perfect if the character arc had any logic. Instead of an arc, we have a flatline punctuated by impulse function spikes in intensity, which makes for an ultimately dissatisfying watching experience. This movie could have been so phenomenal, if only there were an actual story to care about. The other actors do what I would consider no better than a serviceable job in their roles; the young boy is mostly mute even before he loses his hearing and Paul Dano has an irritating milquetoast facies that could have been truly creepy if only Eli's motivations for his hyperreligiosity and hypocrisy were ever explained. Instead, I just found him to be an irritating weeny. BTW, I for one can not stand when characters who are supposed to be aging in a film show no physical change despite the alleged passage of several years in the storyline. Paul Dano shows absolutely NO evidence of aging over the same timespan that H.W.'s character transforms from a 10 year old boy to a man in his mid-twenties. We are denied any demonstration of the transition undergone by the characters as we move from the oil prospecting years to the depiction of Plainview as a crazy old Kane in his mansion in the final scenes. Why are we supposed to believe that Plainview would so deeply resent or hate H.W. at that point, or that all the apparent affection he showed the boy through most of the film would be instantaneously snuffed out? Again, compare this to Corleone in the Godfather - we watch Pacino physically transform from a doe-eyed young idealist into a weathered, wrinkled, unsmiling, aged loner staring vacantly with resolve, if not remorse, at his dissolution and we are convinced of it because it has played out with a logical, linear plot line.
As for Paul Thomas Anderson, I am still at a loss to understand why people think this guy is a genius. Other than Boogie Nights and marrying the supremely talented Maya Rudolph, most of his other choices have perplexed me. I for one HATED Punch Drunk Love (another pointless exercise in self-indulgent, albeit gorgeous, cinematography that fails to advance a storyline) and never quite got through Magnolia.
This is probably a movie I would sit through again on the small screen just because I find DDL engaging, but I would not recommend anyone spend 3 hours and $10 in a theater to end up just as frustrated. Finally, for a movie entitled "There Will Be Blood," there wasn't nearly enough of it - the deaths are fairly bloodless, in fact, and nowhere near as uncomfortably gruesome as those in "No Country for Old Men." Both this movie and that one have unsatisfying auteurish endings that basically defeat the purpose of the great acting that precede them.