Movie Review: There Will Be Blood
Published March 02, 2008
The trouble here is in the story and the script, and that’s why I think this film is very instructional for those writers who worry about things like plot, character development, and the play between emotional tension and release — writers who care about stories that demand difficult resolutions. Once the kid leaves the scene, there’s very little to be said for this film on all these scores.
I so wanted to see how this villainous man was going to be able to raise this badly injured boy. I thought I was being prepared for this by the genuine close affection the two have for each other before the boy is sent away. Once he goes, though, there’s no alternate force in Plainview’s emotional situation that allows his character to develop in ways that make profound emotional decisions necessary. I believe that all great fiction has at its core central characters who go from a state of emotional ignorance to one of disastrous revelation or soulful deliverance. Plainview, with the help of a great deal of alcohol, descends into simple disaster, simple ignorance, and simple depravity.
In the last scene, when he finally loses every shred of nuance in his character and bludgeons a man to death on –- would you believe? –- a bowling lane, he’s heard to utter “I’m finished!” It’s the last line in the movie, and after Day-Lewis’s stirring utterance of the line, delivered in all its Academy Award-worthy stentorian gruffness, I observed to my companion in the theater that I had known that an hour ago, and why did it take this man so long to find it out?
There is one other great theme in this movie, and that is the battle between fundamentalist Christianity and rapacious capitalism. The people from whom Plainview wrests the land below which the oil lies are all poor evangelist Protestants. Their preacher is a young man named Eli, and he becomes the thorn in Plainview’s side throughout the film. I liked the conceit because this character is that most enjoyable of Christian right-wing zealots, the one whose own moral underpinning falls to ruin even as he maintains his egregiously self-righteous hubris. We all know that this kind of person abounds in contemporary Christianity because we see them being exposed in various scandals all the time. They are the purest form of hypocrite that exists in today’s American society.
- Movie Review: There Will Be Blood
- Published: March 02, 2008
- Type: Review
- Section: Video
- Filed Under: Video: Drama
- Writer: Terence Clarke
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- Terence Clarke's personal site
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finally got around to watching the infamous There Will Be Blood... Daniel-Day Lewis' performance was top-notch. He takes well to the overbearing, violent father-figure role -- he also did this in Gangs of New York.
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Well that was a nice review of the film. Thank goodness this reviewer chose not to compare the film to one of Kubrick's films. I think it's a bit of a stretch to compare this film with the works of S. Kubrick but it does indeed attempt to approach it. I must clearly state however, that it's attempted style-copy fails in each attempt. I'm going to blame its failure on the editing and mismatched musical soundtrack.
The editing of the film usually done these days under strict control of the director, almost seemed to intend on lengthening the runtime just for the sake of being able to add the word "epic" to the list of adjectives used for it's description.
The scoring for the film I contend was an attempt to rip off the production company by producing "loops" of percussion and noise that didn't sync to anything other than the composer's mood or "feeling" established at the beginning 3 or 5 seconds of each scene. That there are many 2 to 4 minute scenes speaks to the amount nauseating repetition within each scene and occasionally these "loop-tracks" would span several scenes without any changes. So the composer spent about one one-hundredth of the time and effort that would normally be required to produce a typically "good" scoring of a film of this length.
As is I can produce all these scores myself on my computer at home in a $5,000 studio in about 2 weeks time. Many of the "loops" additionally contained recognizable sound effects from very inexpensive instrument and effects CDs available on the web for well under $100.
Either problem if remedied would bring the quality of this film indeed much closer to a Kubrick level of standards. If the scenes were edited down to a more reasonable length the soundtrack would require less repair as a result and if even only the soundtrack were scored professionally the scenes might not cause the tedium that had me wanting to walk out of the theater on many occasions.
Additionally, reviewers of this film could add interest and intrigue by mentioning the real world counterpart that the Daniel Plainfield character was indeed based on. Of course that would require them to do a bit of research - gawd forbid.