Blood Spilled

Your appreciation for the film "There Will be Blood" may depend on your tolerance for its main character Daniel Plainview played ferociously by Daniel Day Lewis. Plainview is an opportunist hell bent on getting his own way, he's also a man who loves no one (except perhaps his adopted son) and despises most people, and this isn't an assumption, this came right from the horses mouth. The problem with "There Will be Blood" is it offers no explanation as to why Plainview came to be this way .

The film starts off with Plainview seeking his fortune, he is alone in a mine digging for silver. This whole sequence is a tour de force in film making containing no dialogue, and we follow Plainview's hardships as he crashes down into the mine breaking his leg and then crawling on his back all the way to civilization again to collect his fortune. Soon afterwards, Daniel's vice turns to oil and we see him create his first oil well where he will gain his vast wealth. However it is here that we see an accident occur that kills Daniel's partner who had a son. Daniel adopts the son as his own and names him H.W. The child becomes a partner of sorts, but Daniel uses him more as an exploitation tool for buying up oil bearing land from the local owners.

One day Daniel is approached from a young man named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) who tells of his family ranch which has an ocean of oil underneath it. Daniel pays Paul for the information and he and H.W. trek their way to the location. There Plainview meets the Sunday family which includes Paul's identical brother Eli (Also Dano) who is described as a religious faith healer but is as every bit as ruthless and oportuistic as Daniel is. There is quite a clever battle of wills between the two men and the grasp of power over the oil well. Eli wants a $5000 donation from Daniel that will go to his church and also that the pipeline be drilled towards it.

Many plot elements arise including an astonishing sequence when the drill finally hits oil and causes H.W. who was sitting close by to lose his hearing, and we also get a long lost brother of Daniel's arrive as well. These scenarios all play into Daniel Plainview's character some how and shape him into the man he becomes at the end of the film, but there is something lacking in it all.

I didn't find myself enjoying "There Will be Blood", I felt like I was kept at a distance from Daniel Plainview, it was as if the film was telling me I wasn't suppose to like this guy, and therefore I had no emotional stake in the story. The film seems to be too muddled in places, and once the motives of Daniel Plainview are revealed, it loses all the mystique and you know where the story and this character are headed.

Daniel Day Lewis has a wonderful uncanny way of disappearing into a character, and he does a great job in this. There is no doubt that this is definitley a performance, you can see it with the mannerisms, and the voice, but it works within the context of the film. Dano is almost Lewis's equal as the little manipulating weasel Eli Sunday.

There are many good things about "There Will be Blood" in a film making aspect, but my admiration can only go so far before I start asking for more. The themes of greed, and hypocracy of the American dream, and religion are all present, but it seemed like it was building to something larger than what it delivered. The ending, which will probably be debated for years rang false to me and just left me further alienated than before.

Paul Thomas Anderson is no doubt a very talented director and I've enjoyed his past films, but perhaps this time his ambition just got the better of him.

I realize this film has a lot of fans some of whom have campared it to "Citizen Kane" which is a bold statement to say about any film. I just didn't buy into Daniel Plainview's world, or maybe I didn't want to, but that's not to say that some day perhaps I might.

2.5 stars out of 4