Great sets, good cinematography, lousy story.

Rating: 5/10 (26 January 2008)

I just saw this movie today ... "Whoa yeah ... finally!" I thought when I saw it in the movie listings here. It was released here yesterday ... about a month after it had hit wide release, I think. By now there have been so many positive reviews ... and I liked the trailer ... so I was looking forward to seeing this movie very much. Unfortunately, it really didn't live up to expectations.
First, though, the good things. I really liked the sets and scenery and cinematography. The good folks in charge of such things really seem to have worked hard to give us a vivid, convincing vision of period oil and period settings for oil production and life in a dry, arid land in the period West.
The acting performances ranged from very good to excellent throughout. Daniel Day Lewis did a wonderful job giving us as convincing a depiction of Daniel Plainview as I for one can imagine.
Having said that, though, Daniel Plainview as a character came across to me as affected, posturing, and very unconvincing. For that matter, most of the characters in this movie were to me unconvincing. And the script that gave them birth was to me generally very, very unconvincing. The action was slow, even boring, without being redeemed by any kind of realistic character development or story development. I honestly thought about walking out a few times, but persevered until the bitter end ... and ended up just shaking my head at a final scene that was to me just utterly incredible.
My own view of almost any movie that professes a realistic historical setting is that there are two major pitfalls to avoid: (1) treating a historical period as if it's a reflection of our own time: "just like us". And (2) treating a historical period as if it's a caricature, almost the opposite of our time: "nothing like us."
There Will Be Blood makes the second mistake,IMHO.
A movie about a bygone world that's really just a caricature, seen through eyes that don't have any sympathy for another time and another place, is an expression of what has sometimes been called "chronological snobbery": the idea that just because people and place belong to the past, they must be brutal or inhuman or idiotic or venal far beyond what we know in our own here-and-now.
So in this movie everyone seems driven by brutality and greed and inhumanity and sheer stupidity far beyond what we would regard as credible in our times, but apparently we're supposed to buy this kind of vision about the past. Why? Because ... "they lived back then" while "we live now" as if that's some kind of automatic reason to embrace a dehumanized view of people who lived and moved on this old world before we were born.
So we have a movie full of people who are all ... meaning, all, with (perhaps) one exception that I can think of ... driven, uncaring, brutal, greedy ... and too stupid to get out of the way of obvious dangers although somehow they've managed to survive, for years and years, in a dangerous, inhospitable environment. Not to give away anything, but the final scene gives examples of all of these incredibilities (if that's the word) in an especially unrealistic vision that (I guess) must be the scriptwriter's idea of how things were back in the early part of the century. Yet anyone with any actual knowledge of the period ... or with any actual knowledge of people in general ... would consider this to make no sense at all.
Don't get me wrong ... a bleak, Hollywood-type nihilism may not be appealing ... not to me anyway ... but it can at least be rendered realistically and convincingly. See for example No Country for Old Men ... another 2007 film that in some ways has the same "flavor" as There Will Be Blood.
But No Country for Old Men gives us a well-scripted story with a strong, convincing plot. There Will Be Blood, in contrast, unfortunately serves up a script that is unconvincing, unrealistic, incredible, ahistorical, and boring.
Charles Delacroix