There Will Be An Underacheiver

I went into my viewing of There Will Be Blood with high expectations. Nominated for a shit-ton of Academy Awards. Score by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead. The best film of the decade! While I knew it was going to be a dark film that forced the viewer to continue watching what they didn’t want to see, I was very disappointed in the overall power of the film. When the credits started rolling, I felt as though I was forced into a disturbing world of greed that failed to instill in me a universal feeling of anger that I almost wanted to get out of the movie. I was troubled; I wasn’t haunted. If you’re going to make a film about a mad oil-man whose love of money and superiority removes all other love from his being, you need to show it through more than random acts of spontaneous murder. I viewed Daniel Plainview more as a psycho than an example of the effects greed can have on a person, which diminished the films ability to make a social and political statement in the midst of its blatant avarice.

The pace and score of the film were not sub-par, but again not up to expectation. Like Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson’s slow direction and reliance on photogenic cinematography bring the film to a complete halt at times. While allowing the viewer time for reflection and thought during a film can be a valuable tool for an enthralled audience, the 158 minute runtime was no doubt excessive for a project with minimal action. Overall I felt the minimalist score suited the open scenery and lack of complexity on the screen, but at times Greenwood’s creations got simply annoying. The continual use of a high-pitched string note to create emotion was intriguing the first couple times, but deafening by the end. To its credit it did establish consistency. Other musical compositions in the film seemed to lack professionalism and utilize very abstract, unrythmic percussion parts, never allowing the listener to establish a pulse to the racket.

With my disappointments established, there are some very high points to There Will Be Blood. It is a dynamic character study, and Daniel Day Lewis’s performance is certainly Oscar Worthy. In a Bill the Butcher-like (Gangs of New York) approach, Lewis has no trouble playing a truly troubled character. He is perhaps the best actor I have ever seen at summoning anger within him self, and the authenticity of his emotions made watching him for two and a half hours manageable. Paul Dano’s portrayal of Eli, a fanatic local minister whose relationship with Plainview creates the films most memorable dialogue, is in my opinion worthy of a Best Supporting Actor nomination.

Despite a stellar cast and some genius moments of writing (final conversation with deaf son), the film could not seem to pull everything together. For sections at I time I would get a glimpse of its brilliance, but always failed to maintain it. There Will Be Blood had the potential to be a masterpiece, and managed to be a good film that was unsuccessful at becoming better than the sum of its parts.