WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!
It starts well enough, with a striking vision of what it was like to work in a hard-scrabble hole in the ground in the 1890s, in search of silver. The madness and misery presented in the first fifteen minutes of There Will Be Blood are memorable because they are suffered in such silence, so effectively staged and beautifully photographed. Dirt, rage, mud, explosives, severe injury... all these are the lot of Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Plainview finds silver in the mine, but to his surprise the real revelation is that he also discovers oil there. Understanding that this can possibly mean immeasurable riches, he becomes an oilman.
On a drilling operation a few years later, one of Plainview’s workers has a small baby son. When the worker is killed in an accident, Plainview takes over the care and feeding of the little boy, and herein lies the key to what could have been a very fine film.
Plainview names the baby H.W., and by the time the boy is about ten, he’s become almost a full partner in Plainview’s explorations for oil in Southern California. As played — in reserved and extremely expressive quiet at first, then silence for the rest — by Dillon Freasier, H.W. is a very bright boy who seems to understand that his “father” Daniel is a cagey, manipulative man. But he commands H.W.’s love and respect nonetheless. Indeed there is a very short scene on a train when H.W. is still a baby that for me legitimizes the emotional connection between them. It simply shows the baby reaching up to touch the man’s face, and Day-Lewis’s tender reaction to this made me think that his character was a man of considerable feeling.
That conviction of mine continued as Plainview, with the ten-year-old H.W. in tow, buys up all the land around the oil discovery he makes in California. Despite his paying pennies on the dollar for the land and his continued manipulation of the former owners, all of whom are poor farmers, Plainview has real regard for the boy, and treats him with tenderness and respect. When the first oil strike comes, H.W. is severely injured in the “hightop” gusher that explodes from the ground. His hearing is destroyed. Although Plainview leaves the boy momentarily when the gusher catches on fire, the scene later in which he embraces the injured boy – both of them covered in black oil – is one of horrified worry and loving regard on Plainview’s part for the boy’s welfare.
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Article comments
1 - Tessy
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.
2 - patrick
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.