Movie Review: There Will Be Blood (2007)
Posted on 16 April 2008 by Gary Karbon
Is this how the West was won and built? Unfortunately yes.
Mad-dog prospectors lusting after silver, oil and power; taking life-and-death chances with their bodies, minds, and souls…
Equally dogged preachers, freewheeling rascals and speculators of every kind roaming them arid hills burning with hope.
Winning some. Losing some. Fast forward a hundred years: welcome to California!
There Will Be Blood trolls a similar territory painted by a gentler brush in the Triple-Oscar-winner classic Elmer Gantry (1960) by Richard Brooks, featuring Burt Lancaster and Jean Simmons.
Is it a coincidence that both movies were adapted from Sinclair Lewis’s novels? I think not.
If this Double-Oscar winner were a vehicle it would be a 53 footer tractor trailer barreling down the highway of history, flattening quite a few “national creation myths” on its path.
Daniel Day Lewis’s Oscar-winning maniacal performance as Daniel Plainview raises both the art of acting and our understanding of America’s past to a new orbit.
The film is remarkable for two technical details as well:
1) This is the only film I’ve seen where there is no dialog during the first 14 minutes and 45 seconds.
It’s a remarkable feat to carry a major movie that long with only images.
Compare with two other great films of 2007, Michael Clayton and No Country For Old Men, which start off with long scenes of voice-over exposition.
2) This film, just like a part of its 2007 competitor No Country For Old Men, was also shot in Marfa, Texas.
Actually I heard that the sets of the two films were very close to one another; practically over the opposite sides of the same hill range.
At some point (I think it was the oil rig fire scene), there was so much smoke over the horizon drifting in from the TWBB set that the NCFOM crew had to postpone shooting to the next day.
But it’s not over. Another Hollywood classic was also shot in Marfa, Texas – Giant (1956), a George Stevens film featuring Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean. (Incidentally, in that film Dean again played an oil prospector who got rich but then destroyed himself.)
These three films got nominated for a total of 25 Oscars [9 (Giant) + 8 (Blood) + 8 (No Country)] and ended up winning 7 [1 (Giant) + 2 (Blood) + 4 (No Country)] .
Not bad for a little town in West Texas, is it?
(WARNING: plot points revealed)
In a nutshell: Daniel Plainview, a nobody from nowhere, claws his way to oil riches around 1900s by using his ruthless determination to succeed.
In the process he uses an adopted boy as his son, to ingratiate himself to the locals as a “family man” and buy their land for as cheap a price as possible.
But Plainview is not the only jackal in town. The budding preacher Eli Sunday (played with a mesmerizing presence by Paul Dano of Little Miss Sunshine) is the chief obstacle between him and his unquestioned dominance.
Preacher Sunday also knows the real score and tries to shake down Plainview in more ways than one.
In the last horrifying scene Plainview proves that preacher Sunday is not his equal when it comes to a Pyrrhic victory which destroys the winner as well.
Writer-Director Paul Thomas Anderson has created a masterpiece that will endure the test of time. One of the best films I’ve seen in a long while.
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