Movie Review: There Will Be Blood
Published March 02, 2008
So I was happy to see such a character going up against the monolithic capitalist and trying to bring him down. I thought, good, we’ll see Evil self-denied doing battle with Evil personified. That’s an interesting conflict.
In the film, though, Eli is played by a young actor named Paul Dano, who is simply not up to the character he has in hand, and certainly not up to Day-Lewis. He overacts remarkably, especially in the two scenes in which –- one — the oilman is humiliated by the preacher in the rickety church on the grounds of the oil operation, and –- two — when the enraged Day-Lewis character verbally tortures the preacher and then kills him.
In both scenes, Dano goes for The Big Scene. But he’s too young and too limited an actor to make either convincing. Poorly directed, too. In the second of his Big Scenes especially, the very last in the movie, he’s helped to his ineptitude by Day-Lewis’s own effort to achieve some sort of King Lear-like bluster. Lear’s character and mind are so much more complex and his emotional state so completely confused and compromised that his bluster ascends to terrifying greatness. He has many people who still love him and will sacrifice everything for him, even though he has made remarkably foolish decisions that have brought his kingdom to a state of full civil war. Any actor playing King Lear has a leg up because the script is so good.
Plainview’s character has ceased being interesting by the time we get to his last scene. Nobody loves him and no one will do anything to help him. He’s become a plain drunk and little else. As Malcolm Lowry so eminently proved in his novel Under The Volcano, a character’s drinking problem isn’t interesting, and cannot carry the story. Poor Day-Lewis is left in this scene with the task of dragging a great, climactic, and apocalyptic performance from it. He achieves the exact opposite.
- 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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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.