I will gum you!! Another uneven PT Anderson picture...

Rating: 5/10 (22 May 2008)

To me, this is a typical PT Anderson film. It has great sequences in it. It also has incredibly bad ones. It's overlong (and I love long films). It has great performances, and it has bad ones. Its dialogue is awful. It has great cinematography and production design, but thematically it's a mess. In other words, There Will Be Blood is an incredibly uneven film, which is consistent with all of PT Anderson's work.
PT Anderson is an anomaly in his age bracket. He's a Gen X director, but has no real sense of Gen X "irony" or smugness. He has ambition coming out of every pore of his body. You have to admire the hell out of him for that. He wants to make the great, grand picture. Most of his peers make very shallow films (Tarantino's Grindhouse is a good example). I can't imagine PT Anderson watching Switchblade Sisters and saying "this is a great film". I can see him saying "that chick is hot, but I still shouldn't be watching this garbage". Having said that, he just can't make a really consistent film. This was his first film in nearly 6 years (the last one was Punch Drunk Love in 2001), and overall, There Will Be Blood is a mess.
There is a lot of good here. The cinematography is gorgeous. It's one of the most beautifully shot films I've seen in a while. The production design is fantastic (by Jack Fisk, one of the best in the business). The acting by Daniel Day Lewis is mesmerizing. Lewis's face, eyes, and voice are so expressive that you forget some of the bad dialogue that you can't take your eyes off of him. There are some downright surreal, intense scenes. When Daniel Day Lewis kills his "brother", it's one of the most effective scenes in the film. Music, look, acting, it all gels. The next scene (in a church) is purposely overlit, and continues the surrealism. It's very good. The rest of the film continues the haunted look, which I really liked.
Unfortunately, these good things are undone by many bad things. The dialogue here has to be some of the worst I've heard in a long time. Andreson has never been able to write really good dialogue, and here it's really bad. Lewis's monologues are really obvious, and the infamous line "I drink your milkshake" has entered into movie folklore, but not for the majesticness of the speech, but for the camp value. There's also a really, really bad line in one of Paul Dano's (Eli Sunday is the name of the character. Rather obvious for a preacher, eh?) where he says "I will gum you!". The townspeople are portrayed as simpletons, something that seems to always happen in period pieces like this. There is no real motivation for Lewis's character other than he is greedy. Thematically, his desertion of his son (he does it twice in the film) makes no sense. One scene he is playing with the boy, then the boy goes deaf, then Lewis puts him on a train. Then he comes back. Then later in the film, Lewis tells his son he's an orphan who Lewis just used as a prop to get people to go along with his plans. This is obviously not true, but there is no explanation, narratively or artistically, as to why there's such inconsistency. PT Anderson seems to be stuck between a straightforward narrative and a surreal tone, and it doesn't work. And the final scene, while beautifully shot and designed, is unintentionally funny, much like the frogs finale in Magnolia.
Dano's character is poorly drawn. Many have said he was miscast, but I would argue that he just didn't have a good character to build on. He's the clichéd preacher. The rest of the character are caricatures. The music score is another problem. Sometimes it's perfect (like in the brother's death scene), other times it's so out of place. Anderson was trying to do something different obviously, but it just doesn't work overall. The score is reminiscent of Stravinsky and Mozart, and sounds more like a symphony than a film score. Many have said that Johnny Greenwood's score would make a good listening experience in itself, away from the film. They're right.
Many have said that PT Anderson borrows (or steals) from Kubrick here. He does. The leaps in time recall the abrupt time changes in 2001 and Full Metal Jacket, the madness of Lewis recalls The Shining, and the eerie, deliberately uttered dialogue in the final scene is reminiscent of the billiard room scene in Eyes Wide Shut. Anderson also said in interviews he wanted to emulate the Dawn of Man sequence in 2001 in the opening of the film (which has minimal dialogue). Regardless of whether Anderson is ripping off Kubrick or simply being influenced by him (there is a difference between the two), the whole film still doesn't flow, like 2001, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut do.
So, overall, this film has enough great moments in it to view it. It is not as good as Citizen Kane or Giant. Those films had a lot of depth and character that this one simply lacks. See There Will Be Blood (great title, by the way) for Daniel Day Lewis, the cinematography, production design, and, if you're into that sort of thing, laugh at the unintentionally funny scenes.