For Those Who call Movies "Film" and use the word "auteur" in regular conversation

Rating: Null/10 (15 September 2011)

Paul Thomas Anderson directed this very loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair's novel "Oil!" and set out to make a epic masterpiece for the ages, using Kubrickian cinematography with the epic performance of Daniel Day Lewis and a foreboding chilling score of screeching violins. Critics and film snobs hailed "There Will Be Blood" as the best movie of the first decade of the Millennium. Praise was given for "There Will Be Blood"'s subversive content, multiple levels of meaning, and in-depth character study of an amoral psychopath.
The first twenty minutes or so open with long slow, plodding panning by the camera over the Texas desert. That glacial pace establishes the tone for the rest of the movie, with interminable amounts of time where nothing happens. The central character is a cold-hearted bastard named Daniel Plainview played by Daniel Day Lewis, in a rehash of his cold-hearted bastard turn in "Gangs of New York", only more evil. Plainview steps over anyone and anything to make a buck in the oil industry: using an orphan as a prop to gain sympathy, cheating honest people out of their land, pretending to find God so he can build an oil pipeline(?) and killing people along the way. The foreboding score establishes mood as if something epic is going to happen in the final reel.
Unfortunately nothing really does. After seeing three decades or so of Plainview's life he begins as an evil despicable man, becomes an evil despicable man, and ends as an evil despicable man. Instead of the grand finale that the audience interminably waits for, the final scene comes out of nowhere with a preacher named Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) that Plainview hates coming to Plainview to beg for money(also out of nowhere). Plainview yells about milkshakes, bludgeons Sunday to death with a bowling pin, then tells the butler "I'm finished." The End.
Raoul Walsh told the same story of an amoral psychopath with the gangster drama "White Heat" way back in 1949. Watch the final scene of White Heat where the great, great James Cagney as Cody Jarret stands on steel grating atop a chemical plant,laughing maniacally as bullets whiz by and fuel tanks blaze, yelling "Made it Ma! Top of the World!" just before the whole thing explodes in a giant inferno. There's an ending. And Walsh managed to do it with 42 less minutes than Paul Thomas Anderson does with "There Will Be Blood".
Whenever the guy typing this review mentions "White Heat" to fans of "There Will Be Blood" it is inevitable that they haven't seen it. Instead of Hollywood classics from the Golden Age, they prefer the too-cool-for-everything worldview of "There Will Be Blood" with its lack of storyline, laborious pacing, bleakness, nihilism and cheap potshots at the Christian faith. Perhaps Paul Thomas Anderson has personally adopted this schadenfreude worldview as he sadistically forces the viewer to realize they have wasted 2 hours and 38 minutes of their precious lifetime that cannot be given back.