Well crafted dullness

Rating: 5/10 (17 May 2016)

Plot summary: Oil guy gets rich, becomes somewhat unlikable.
I had heard good things about this movie, so I had decent hopes going in. The movie certainly started off good - watching the rise of Daniel Plainview had me interested. Plainview starts out in a hole, then builds a rig, then buys a lot of land, gets townspeople to work for him, buys more land - you get the idea. But somewhere along the way, you realize there isn't much of a point to anything. We all know this kind of story - what's different here? Actually, not much. The plot kinda just does its y=mx+b thing. We climb the roller-coaster, just, ploddin' along, you know, but then we stop after 2.5 hours and someone just says - "Hurray, you're at the top! Hope you had fun."
There Will Be Blood was mostly watching people do stuff. Sure, that's every movie, but ever tell a story at a party, and it turns out there was no point and you feel dumb because people listened for like 4 minutes and it just kind of trailed off? I mean, it sounded interesting in your head, right? And it was! You should probably just practice your storytelling. That was this movie, except it was 2.5 hours and not 4 minutes.
In addition to being rather uneventful, the movie suffers from a distinct lack of character development. Plainview is the centerpiece, and the entire movie is about his quest for oil. Plainview himself starts off interesting enough, but after a while he's just the guy you end up watching because everyone else is even less interesting. In his quest for oil, he never has to make any difficult decisions. Why do I care whether he makes a deal with A or B for the pipelines or railroads? We see him set up to swindle people out of their land, and we're prepared to see greed take over, but his actions leave us ambivalent. As he keeps buying and building, he never has any hard obstacles to overcome, has essentially no meaningful interactions with other characters, and basically amounts to some guy getting progressively richer off of oil, whose morals sometimes dip their toes into what I think is supposed to be avarice. You don't feel bad for other characters he sometimes foils because they're either irritating and deserve it or too stupid for their own good. Overall, he's just some guy. A convincing, well-acted portrayal of some guy, but just some guy nonetheless.
Everyone else is a temporary prop intended for Plainview's marginal character development. His young son is dapper, and it's a bummer when he loses his hearing. What a jerk Plainview was to put him on a train when he got sick of him. Their pedestrian activities continue on like this, fascinating us like rain in London. Plainview meets some yokel masquerading as his long lost brother. Now, whether you bet that such a man would turn out to be a fraud or not makes no difference - he was, and when Plainview figured it out, the man ended up in a shallow grave. If I was supposed to care, I didn't because I was probably too busy not caring. The only other character of partial significance was Eli, an obnoxious preacher whose melodramatic antics would surely make anyone's skin crawl. There is a power play between Eli and Plainview, each one finding a way to grind the other under his heel from time to time. But there was no real point, and nothing ever comes of their interactions. These were collectively the only other characters, yet they had no depth and did not develop. They hardly added to the plot, and they were neither interesting nor entertaining in their own right. They weren't even in most of the scenes. Effortlessly forgettable, really.
The movie also didn't convey any interesting themes or messages. Are we supposed to see how money and power corrupt? On the spectrum of good and evil, Plainview is too close to boring to represent that (maybe a 4, just below normal). What about father-son themes? Again, no, because their interactions are limited and shallow; if Plainview's angry words to his son at the end were supposed to convince us of something, they were a day late and a dollar short. What about the relationships or similarities between business and religion? Perhaps we are supposed to see how both are evil, or evil when taken to extremes? But Plainview and Eli are just unlikable, and the link to business or religion just isn't important. We briefly see how dumb religion makes people, screaming and superstitious, but that clearly wasn't the message. We don't angry at god, or the church, or religion, or any of the values or ideas they represent such as faith, forgiveness, worldly corruption, misguided morality, intrinsic falsehood, or so on. And so it is with Plainview.
I will say that despite being too long, the movie is well put together (like those Led Zeppelin tracks everyone enjoys in the background at Guitar Center but doesn't actually elect to listen to for the full 8 minutes on their own time). The actors were good, the sets were convincingly barren, and they got costume people who really knew how to make those perpetually-dirty- how-is-anything-ever-clean-in-this-poverty-stricken-former-era type clothes. The orchestra always showed up 30 seconds to 1 minute ahead of time saying, "It's time to be antsy. We're going to play antsy music now to help you feel antsy. We're going to compensate for the overwhelming dullness of the desert. Ready? Drone!"
Overall, this movie doesn't have any real redeeming factors. I mean, watching people do stuff is not painful, really, so it's not bad per-se, either. I wasn't entertained, but I wasn't particularly put off. Even though the acting was good, the actors had little to work with. There Will Be Blood was a profoundly mediocre cinematic experience.