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Thread: Paul Thomas Anderson: There Will Be Blood (2007)

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    Paul Thomas Anderson: There Will Be Blood (2007)

    Paul Thomas Anderson: There Will Be Blood (2007)

    Paul Thomas Anderson's stunning American epic of ego and greed

    Review by Chrfis Knipp

    Paul Thomas Anderson is a formidably talented filmmaker whose every new work is an event to be awaited eagerly. Everything he has done is original and strong and passionate. Some think Boogie Nights was his masterpiece, Magnolia overly ambitious, Punch Drunk Love a minor work. In fact, including the classically concise Hard Eight, all his movies are uniquely interesting illustrations of his gifts. After a pause of five years, There Will Be Blood shows him rejuvenated and shooting for the stars, with a film of huge ambition about a hugely ambitious man. This one, not without the flaws of that ambition, has a larger set of themes and a deeper resonance.

    Using as a starting point Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! but deriving his hero also from Von Stroheim's silent classic, Greed, based on Frank Norris' novel, McTeague, Anderson has made an epic set in the first quarter of the twentieth century about one overweening and titanically determined individual whose life is dominated, whether he chooses or not, by America’s two great obsessions: money and religion.

    The scarily intense actor Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Daniel Plainview, a self-made millionaire who gets rich as an oilman so he can put distance between himself and people, the majority of whom he hates with a ferocity equaling his ambition. His enemy/doppelganger/nemesis is Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) a young healer/preacher who draws his congregation from the inhabitants of Plainview’s oil drilling land. Mysteriously, Sunday’s identical brother Paul (also Dano) is the one who shows up early on and persuades Plainview to pay him a tidy sum to know where his family’s land is, because there is a lot of oil boiling up on it. This leads to the series of claims and land-grabs that occupy the rest of the story.

    Plainview has no clear origins. The ultimate self-made man, he emerges from the soil like some primordial creature. We first see him digging for silver, going down into the bowels of the earth and eating dinner crouched like a primate in the opening segment of Kubrick's 2001, which Anderson’s haunting prologue, with its wonderful use of the music by Jonny Greenwood that flows through the whole film, unmistakably evokes. The film will suggest and draw on many other sources, Stevens' Giant, shot like this near Marfa, Texas, Welles' Citizen Kane, John Huston and his classic film of B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; and others. An electrical tone dominates the air as if the whole landscape were alive with some terrible unknown power--the power to be exploited, dominated, but a power that can backfire and destroy its exploiters. Plainview’s relation is with the land, to take its riches and make himself rich. People are to be dealt with and told whatever story convinces them to do what he needs. He is a character so cold and inhuman and intense in his relationship with money that he is ready for one of the deepest bolgias of Dante’s Inferno, and sometimes he already seems to be there. Early on, the hero crawls out of the hole he’s dug badly injured, sliding along the ground like the damaged mountain climber in the documentary, Touching the Void. It's as if he's been into Hell and come out for a spell, to strut and walk upon P.T. Anderson’s stage.

    The movie's epic battle is, in a sense, a false one: it’s not between God and Mamon, but between Mamon and a tainted, ersatz God, because Eli Sunday is a charlatan, a mountebank. Dano’s church scenes are theatrical and absurd but convincing. Anderson is "great with actors," which means letting them open up to their fullest potential and taking risks with them. Dano is a risk, and himself takes risks. Day-Lewis chews up the landscape, mouthing and intoning his every line in what seems an evocation of Huston as Noah Cross in Polanski's Chinatown. He is extreme, but his conviction is so great that he convinces. Even if he didn’t, he would be fun to watch from first to last. Life in the old West is life on another, alternate planet where people could and did make their own rules; Anderson's actors make theirs. Strangely, as much as Plainview hates people, he allows himself to be humiliated, when it is necessary to serve his aims. And this is where Eli Sunday comes in.

    Though the mood of mystery and potentially of There Will Be Blood is long sustained, Anderson has some history of having trouble with endings and has sometimes resorted to desperate measures to conclude with drama, most notably the plague of frogs in Magnolia. That is a biblical tale, and the Bible is another source: Daniel Plainview is like some Old Testament prophet raining down destruction and reaping gold. In the finale of this film, Anderson relies heavily on Dano, a young and relatively inexperienced actor. Dano is strange and powerful, but somehow as an adversary he seems inadequate, as does the final confrontation between the two men. There is nothing like the magisterial ominousness of the movie's introduction, but that is such a remarkable achievement that it resonates long in the mind. No other movie this year so grips you and holds you riveted in its spell as this one.

    And all the way through there are wonderful scenes, mostly out of doors and around oil wells. There are Plainview’s tense, teeming meetings with people whose land he wants or cooperation he needs to stake out new claims. The burning geyser is most notable, a sequence whose exact composition and flowing camera movement don’t keep it from having singular urgency. The man goes around with an innocent-faced boy called H.W. (Dillon Freasier) he has raised from a baby, lacing his bottle with whiskey. H.W. stands silently by in Plainfield’s public appearances to make him look like a family man; but there is no wife. Later there is a mysterious man (Kevin J. O'Connor) who appears saying he’s the oilman’s half brother. When both these relationships deteriorate, horribly, Plainview is finally alone with his adversaries.

    It’s been accurately said that There Will Be Blood is both an epic and a miniature. In contrast to the multivalent, polymorphous Boogie Nights and the multi-voiced Magnolia, this is a story in which one figure dominates, and tends to destroy those around him. It's a terrible picture of the rapacious nature of capitalism and the isolating power of avarice. My reference to Dante’s Hell wasn’t casual, because Anderson’s Plainview truly qualifies as one of Dante’s most eternally damned, frozen in an isolation of self-interest, sacrificing even the most basic human ties. As enigmatic as Welle’s Charles Foster Kane, we watch him with fear of what he may do next. He seems to simultaneously declaim and chew his words, as if he wants to spew them out but then bites them back, and thus Day-Lewis draws attention to his every utterance but also gives consistency to a character who otherwise isn’t predictable. Strangest of all, for somebody who’s such a hostile egomaniac, you wouldn’t expect him so often to speak polite, cajoling words. "I don’t like to explain myself" however is the truest thing he says. Anderson has given us a treasure to ponder over and explain if we can.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 02-07-2010 at 07:53 PM.

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    Interesting.
    Thanks.
    P.T. Anderson met Kubrick, you know.
    "Set the controls for the heart of the Sun" - Pink Floyd

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    Paul Thomas Anderson takes on the epic genre and, by focusing on one man's insular war with the world, turns it on its head--and has made what is perhaps the finest film of the decade. Anderson, in his first four films, came off as an almost idiot savant with his near-encyclopedic knowledge of cultural and film currents and There Will Be Blood seems just as obsessive in its detail about both its nominal subject, drilling for oil, and the history of epic filmmaking. But he also narrows his story (based on Sinclair Lewis' Oil!, unread) to the motivations of one man (Daniel Day Lewis in one of the finest performances in recent memory) and by doing so uncovers some fascinating themes pertinent to America's history and its state today: the pitting of the individual against nature and the corporation, the abandonment of the family bond in the pursuit of dominance and, perhaps most importantly, the forced marriage of religion and free enterprise. This is a more mature Anderson than in his previous films; where he has displayed a cynical, albeit affectionate, attitude towards his characters, here he tends to keep a respectful distance, manipulating them as both archetypes and individuals and, aside from a snarky punchline that could only come in an Anderson picture, maintains a seriousness that befits his subject and themes. Anderson dedicates his film to Robert Altman and Altman's influence is certainly there; but the outsized scope and ideas are more reminiscent of Citizen Kane and it could just as convincingly be a tribute to Orson Welles. With Paul Dano as the preacher Eli Sunday, Lewis' rival for control of the self, in a performance that matches Lewis' note for note and is also one of the finest you will see.

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    Chris Knipp wrote:

    Kubrick's 2001, which Anderson’s haunting prologue, with its wonderful use of the music by Jonny Greenwood that flows through the whole film, unmistakably evokes.

    Exactly right.

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    Thanks. The movie has a monumental feel. Whether it will stand as the best of the decade -- well, that's a tall order indeed.
    This is a more mature Anderson than in his previous films; where he has displayed a cynical, albeit affectionate, attitude towards his characters, here he tends to keep a respectful distance, manipulating them as both archetypes and individuals
    It is I agree a "more mature" effort, the product of much thought, more ambitious in scope and more detached in observation. It also has a more formal feel, as befits the epic style.

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    A Flawed But Great Movie

    I won't deny I didn't enjoy this movie. I saw it last night and had intended to really tear the movie apart. I did find a good number of problems with the movie which in my mind denies this movie its status as "the finest film in the decade" and which is reserved in my opinion for Atonement. Nevertheless, I thought Daniel Day-Lewis' performance as brilliant, even more so because it was his performance and the story that held the movie together so much as that it is one of the best movies of the year, though again I have a number of different movie selections that I prefer. I wouldn't mind it one bit if Mr. Day-Lewis receives a best actor award for his performance. As for the movie itself, I was put off by the musical score and the 2001: A Space Odyssey association and would have much rather heard music from the period. The harsh, mechnical music that was also included on the soundtrack didn't feel consistent with the movie either. While hearing the distracting music I had images of industrial machines in some gigantic factory instead of oil fields. I also imagined Touching The Void and thought the how injuried Daniel Day-Lewis was a poor match for the injured mountain climber performance in the comparable scene from Touching the Void. The whole beginning of the movie was confusing, somewhat unbelievable though fascinating to look at and experience. There were just too many accidents or oversights - a sort of script device to jumpstart the movie. I was dumbfounded by the father and son relationship which never really jelled and took off on a strange tangent midway through the movie. I was also put off-balance by Mr. Plainview's behavior that really was satisfactorily explained in the movie and for an epic character movie I would have thought it was key to an epic movie that we the audience would be allowed to go inside the mind of Mr. Plainview, to understand the motivations, his feelings, his conflicts. Nevertheless, I thought the movie compelling and I never could get myself to dislike it one bit. It was well done. However, if it had only tightened up on its technical merits, it could have been in my mind a timeless classic.

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    tabuno wrote:

    I was also put off-balance by Mr. Plainview's behavior that really was satisfactorily explained in the movie and for an epic character movie I would have thought it was key to an epic movie that we the audience would be allowed to go inside the mind of Mr. Plainview, to understand the motivations, his feelings, his conflicts.

    I found Plainview's actions throughout self-explanatory (I think we all know someone with ambitions like his--they're called "A" personalities) but his conversation with his "half-brother" was all the expository enlightenment I needed.

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    Chris Knipp wrote:

    Whether it will stand as the best of the decade -- well, that's a tall order indeed.

    You know, I went over my lists from this decade of films that were made in this decade and I couldn't find one. Just my opinion though--and I'm not nearly able to see as many movies as I'd like. Or should.

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    Superficial Explanation

    For the best film of the decade, this character-driven drama only reveals the surface thoughts of Mr. Plainview coming out of his mind, yet they are only the immediate feelings that serve only to raise more questions about this man's motivations, what made him what he his, what motivates his thoughts that he expresses publicly? So he begins to want to leave the human race behind that he hates, but what about it? Why does he so despise people? Without more, his actions appear to arise more from a mental disorder. It is hard to empathize with this person because he remains a mystery. Unlike Bob Harris's character in Lost in Translation (2003) who most people might be able to identify with, his immersion into a foreign culture, his role as a disgruntled actor, Mr. Plainview on the otherhand isn't so plain, isn't as easily grasped. For the best film of the decade, this movie fails to provide the necessary psychological underpinning so that the audience can more easily access this character. It's not the fault of Daniel Day-Lewis by any means, he was able to pull almost every particle of personality and his character's essence out from what he was given, but what he was given wasn't enough for the best film of the decade. Daniel Day-Lewis along with Johnny Depp easily deserve Best Acting honors, but what if he had had best of the decade script to begin with what magical ethereal performance for all time could his role have been?
    Last edited by tabuno; 01-22-2008 at 09:46 PM.

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    The Best Films of the Past Decade

    I don't feel that THERE WILL BE BLOOD is alone for this decade's best films, personally in addition to ATONEMENT as being the best films of the past decade, I include on my list THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (2007), NORTH COUNTRY (2005), and DOGVILLE (2004). As I mentioned earlier, THERE WILL BE BLOOD had some, in my mind, cinematic flaws that needlessly diminished the overall movie experience for me, but these were minor, but sufficient to deny this movie the best film of the decade honor.

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    I don't want to be misconstrued as someone who doesn't like There Will Be Blood. I think it's an intriguing, spellbinding, engaging film. I have yet to draw a list of favorites films of 2007 (regulars know I wait until I've seen as many elegible films as I can) but I wouldn't be surprised if Anderson's film makes my Top 10.

    However, it's far from perfect as far as I'm concerned. And the main problem is not the bombastic, over-the-top ending. The main problem is that the themes so craftily summarized by bix171 don't resonate with sufficient force and clarity because the two central characters are too extreme to be adequately representative. A critic from San Francisco described Sunday as "somewhere between a freak and a phony". I would add that Plainview is somewhere between a freak and a monster. Characters too unhinged to make generalizations about religion, free enterprise and their "forced marriage" based on their behavior. Fascinating movie characters? No doubt.

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    It's just a great film whether you like it or not. Which is also true of No Country for Old Men if to a lesser extent. Everybody can agree There Will Be Blood is the greater film but both are masterful filmmaking. As The Nation's film critic Stuart Klawans said in his review "A Hard Man," in Blood you see one sequence after another coming and you know right away they're going to be classics.
    Grim and gleeful, mechanistic and demonic, this tremendous set piece [of the gusher and fire, and the son's traumatic injury] stands out as the most elaborate segment in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood but is only one of the film's half-dozen great dramatic eruptions. All of them are instantly recognizable as classic. Each is distinct in setting and style. . .
    And actually tthere are more than Klawans lists: almost every scene is conceived as a glittering unforgettable set piece.

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    The Beginning Scene Captures Novelty

    Johann:

    How many films today give you that feeling of "classic" as soon as you start watching it?
    While I can't say that the beginning of THERE WILL BE BLOOD having a classic feeling, there is something about the beginning scene that grabbed my attention as to this being a special movie. Even though the initial sound track was off-putting to me and didn't seem to fit the era or time or place, the visual images of a man prospecting under this isolated condition was new for me and I found interesting and sufficiently different that I enjoyed the experience of what was going on, even though the whole sequence of events at the beginning along with the distracting sound track and the subsequent series of what I considered rather improbable accidents as they occurred on the conditions as I saw them, nevertheless I continued watching captivating by what was going on. I was learning and experiencing something new and I was interested. If that is a classic feeling beginning, o.k., but it was impressive whatever you call it.

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    I've finally seen this (on DVD) and I was incredibly impressed.

    It is one of the best films of the decade and one of the best I've ever seen. It is extremely riveting. I don't have too much to add to what's already been said about it here but the first shot we see of the bowling alley is a bona-fide Kubrick homage. I know there are others, but that one stares out at you like a blinker.
    The precision & composition of the shot is the exact same as the elevator doors in The Shining before the blood flows.
    Wonderful to witness.

    I was wondering exactly when "there will be blood" while watching. My reaction to the ending produced a wide smile.

    Really admire this film. The cinematography is stunning.
    Beautiful film to watch. We need more films like this.
    The story doesn't blow me away but all of the other aspects elevate it to a very high rank.

    Daniel Day-Lewis is fearsome in a dark mustache, man.
    Gangs of New York and now this.
    I want to see him in a completely different type of movie this time.
    I want to see if he can NOT do a role without that furnace-of-hell intensity.
    Can he don a dress and play a gender-bending role like Jack Lemmon's in Some Like it Hot?

    I wonder..
    "Set the controls for the heart of the Sun" - Pink Floyd

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    Thanks for your comments on this great movie. My admiration for Anderson is boundless and has been since I first learned who he was, though Boogie Nights came at a bad time for me and I could hardly bear to watch it. But Magnolia I loved, and Hard Eight, seen on DVD or laser disk or VHS tape, is an impressive beginning and I should watch it again. I like and defend everything he has done. His talent is as large as his ambition.

    The story you don't like so much--that I can understand. People find the character of Daniel Plainview unappealing. The links with Citizen Kane are both a strength and a weakness; I think of Kane in relation to the bowling alley. People also hate that final sequence, think it too long and misjudged. The best of the film is the long opening section, with its epic feel and its visual awe, the sheer grandeur of it, the capacity to think big hardly any director has nowadays. (When I watched George Stevens' Giant recently i saw how Anderson had borrowed from Stevens' editing style--and his grand design.)

    It's too bad you didn't get to see this in a theater, in a big auditorium in fact with a very large screen, but one can imagine. That's what DVDs are for.

    I wonder if Daniel Day Lewis in The Ballad of Jack and Rose isn't doing a lighter role. I'm sure he could wear a dress. The question is if he'd look good in one. Young guys work much better as girls than gnarly older guys--the very prietty Emile Hirsch in the little seen The Mudge Boy (2003). Lewis, like many Englishmen, has a lighter attitude toward himself than American do. His grace and modesty at Oscar time and also at the SAG Awards was ornamented by his lovely tributes to the art of the late Heath Ledger. An actor of rare eloquece and goodness as himself.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 10-20-2008 at 11:13 PM.

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