So what is it about TWBB that you don’t like?
ok. i am going to try this. i am not a big fan of p t anderson. i never liked any of his films until i saw punch drunk love. it was so unique and visually interesting without being showy and told a great love story made only greater by its simplicity. the characters were complex but their story was not pushed around and bogged down by other less interesting sub-plots. this film was also the fist time i felt i was watching p t andersons own style of film making come to the fore instead of him interpreting the styles of those directors he admired. this is what i felt when i watched there will be blood, the film was entirely his and all his influences had integrated themselves into his style and he was utilising them and not using them. there will be blood i also did not find to be a showy film at all despite the sets and characterisations, i found it quite restrained and effortlessly beautiful. i was never taken out of the film by the film making. i am not even a fan of daniel day lewis yet in this film i found him to be compellingly unhinged, larger than life and dangerously real, unlike his gangs of new york character which i found to be a caricature. did that all sound like a bunch of crap?
Roscoe, I didn’t say I disliked TWBB, but I couldn’t share others’ enthusiasm for it.
No, it didn’t sound like a bunch of crap, Shannan. I do know it’s sometimes hard to say why one likes of doesn’t like something, so thanks for sharing your thoughts. There have been films I initially disliked or was indifferent to and was ‘turned around’ on by a bit of help or explanation from a friend or critic. Others I was bowled over by as I watched them but which fell by the wayside on further thought. Maybe with some help I’ll see what’s good in TWBB.
Feu, why don’t you share others’ enthusiasm for it? What is lacking in TWBB that you find so present in PTA’s other work?
thanks, that was kind of scary to post that. dont get me wrong about p t andersons other films, there are elements of them i liked and i think he is one of the most talented american directors working at the moment and i am really looking forward to his next film. and the end of there will be blood i think is the best i have seen since eyes wide shut. i have only seen the film once and it has not left my head.
Shannan, beware. The more you see TWBB the more it gets into your head and won’t get out. I speak from experience, the film is gripping like few others in recent years.
thanks roscoe i cant wait to see it again, i am haunted by the memory of it. every time i see a still ….
I’m wracking my brain to think of another relatively recent film which was as intimately disturbing and resonant an experience as TWBB—and I can’t.
For me TWBB is an interesting departure for PT Anderson as a friend so elequently put it “..theres not tits, no music…?” I think its a great example of how artist can grow and progress. He experimented more with the choice of setting of his drama but still remained true to looking at the central themes of his previous works: Family, Greed, Sickness (mental, bodily) Father and Son relationships
I Agree with you i don’t hold it as high as Magnolia and its not as fun as Boogie Nights i find it on par with Punch Drunk a lesser work in the artists filmography but not in anyway bad.
Anderson has a way of shedding skins in such a dazzling way, and just when you think this skin is the shit, he reveals something even more dazzling underneath. He grows amazingly as an artist with each film. Boogie Nights was big and rowdy and loud, and just what was needed in 1997. But Magnolia went deeper. Punch Drunk Love deeper still, and without the need to dissipate its energy over such a huge canvass. There Will Be Blood is his first fully mature, grown up film, and it’s a masterpiece. It’s probably the best American film since Blue Velvet (with the possible exception of some Gus Van Sant).
Why? It’s like Citizen Kane, in that it attempts to reflect the entirety of American experience through one larger than life individual who is fantasically successful from a material standpoint but thoroughly empty from an emotional one. It’s not even clear whether Plainview has ever loved anyone — certainly not in the film, and probably never. His love is gold and oil, but more than that, the ability to fuck with people with impunity. This kind of story needs to be told again and again, especialy at certain points in our history, when greed and materialism go steeply on the rise.
Great films are essentially made of great moments, great things, things we love to see again and again. And this film is full of amazing moments that I wait for and eagerly anticipate every time I watch. The deaths of the two prospectors when things fall on them down in the wells. The quail hunting scene. The “blessing” of the well. The “I’m gonna fuck this out of you” that Eli hisses to the arthritic old woman as he faith heals her dementedly in the church. The shocking scene where Plainview beats Eli, followed by Eli’s beating of Plainview during the baptism. The killing of the false brother. Plainview shouting “A bastard from a basket!” again and again as his deaf son walks out of his life. And of course, the final scene.
Everything works in this film. Overwrought? Call Plainview just plain loco and admire the way Day-Lewis makes him so tightly wrapped, so super-functional, up until the final explosion.
word to word, adjectives and all…..your opinion is just right Justin. I really liked the way Anderson uses uncompromising characterization of Plainview to bring much discipline into the motives and structure on the whole, as in, no women, despising people, showcasing son as a prop, cynical and money minded – its a character that comes very rarely to cinema and the adulation very much justified.
I didn’t like it as I felt it was this old style moralization story that I had seen a million times before. I like DD Lewis but in this case I thought he was over the top. It probably has to do with how “Oil!” is written but I didn’t come out of it thinking it was a masterpiece by any standards, it’s a very simple story where practically the entirety of Western civilization is put on the shoulders, represented by, DD Lewis’ character.
I did like certain parts the way certain scenes worked, some of the shooting, some of the sound, but it was a disappointment. It just didn’t move me, I felt it was all surface and that everybody was just trying too hard to be profound.
But Loki, these characters still exist and are running our world today. The power-mad oil men who don’t care how many people have to die for them to get the oil they want. The evangelical christians who are really closet homosexuals. The traumatized children of the rich and famous. This film resonates, it could be ripped from today’s headlines.
Exactly, it’s a cliche. Each of those characters is already a cliche. We know this stuff already, hell I know people just like the characters, only the people I know are more complicated. All I can say is I went in with great hopes but felt like it was an old style morality tale that I had really, really, already seen. Did like “Punch Drunk Love” though…
Your all missing the point. This movie is about a man selling his soul piece by piece to the American Dream. How a man who literally DRUG HIMSELF OUT OF A HOLE IN THE GROUND, and built an empire. Every aspect of it screams at all of us trying to struggle and create a life for ourselves. How we can all give up all that is truly dear to us for money, profit, fame. This man gives up his rights to his own surrogate son…by his own words!! The most important line in the film comes at the end, “I’m done now!” Do you not see that he is nothing more than an empty husk at this point? He’s nothing but the name he created for himself!
I’ve only seen this movie once.
Also, great job. You’re all noobs!
I thought adam sandler was amazing the way that PTA used his comic (violent manchild) persona for drama was very impressive. That being said I did not like DDL in blood. I thought he was hammy; there was barely any scenes when u couldn’t feel him acting (much like pacino in city hall or 88mins). The lead aside, it was a fair film.
Edit: Armons White review
No!” is the first word spoken in There Will Be Blood, and it should be the last said in response to Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest pretend epic. That obstinate “No!” is Daniel Plainview’s refusal to accept the fate awaiting him when he falls on his back and breaks a leg in his California silver mine in 1898. “No!” startles our concentration on the mystery of who he is and what he’s doing. The lonely willfulness of an American pioneer is also the stubborn tenacity of a born isolate and naysayer.
As Daniel Day Lewis plays the part, Plainview is also a ferocious psychopath. His curious position as There Will Be Blood’s central character makes one recall the question Paul Newman asks in his soliloquy in Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians: “How come you took him to be a hero?”
The key problem of There Will Be Blood is that Anderson takes Plainview to be a hero—personifying everything that’s wrong in American character: greed, selfishness, stinginess and unchecked ambition. He’s a shock-and-awe hero who reduces all to shame. Mounting a large-scaled epic around such a characterization would be unthinkable before the 2000 presidential election unleashed the Left’s rage, and yet Altman-acolyte Anderson isn’t asking sympathy (like Altman did in his Richard Nixon movie, Secret Honor) because Blood is a guilt-soaked epic. Americans are meant to identify with Plainview for the worst aspects of themselves.
That makes the movie an oddball showcase for Day Lewis. His twisted charisma and commanding skill galvanize the 30-year plot developments and the parade of sketchy subordinate characters: a charlatan preacher, Eli (Paul Dano); an estranged brother (Kevin J. O’Connor) and a loyal but deaf adopted son (Russell Harvard). Plainview’s family-narrative tree suggests what Pauline Kael said about Days of Heaven: You can hang all your old metaphors on it. It’s never clear what Anderson intends these characters to mean—for Plainview or us. The movie’s interest lies simply in how Plainview reacts to them. Day Lewis digs deep into primordial madness—evoking Western culture’s most memorable freaks from Prospero to Captain Ahab to Gordon Gekko.
Plainview is the most remarkable movie performance since Eddie Murphy’s Norbit trifecta. One must recognize that Day Lewis’ is also a postmodern comic turn. He gives Plainview the insinuating growl of John Huston’s Noah Cross in Chinatown—a Biblical allusion already tied to both Hollywood dynastic history and the corrupt pioneer spirit. And because Anderson anxiously pitches himself into American cinema tradition, Day Lewis’ flinty characterization resembles the same obdurate old man that Jason Robards Jr. etched so magnificently in Anderson’s overweening Magnolia—only Day-Lewis has two and a half hours to do it. A thousand times better than his Gangs of New York butcher, he keeps coming up with actorly surprises from his own British theatrical tradition. The way Plainview shames his son by calling him an “Oooorphan” combines cruelty and self-dramatization in a way that recalls the hammy grandeur of Olivier and Charles Laughton at their best.
There may be no contemporary director more self-dramatizing than Paul Thomas Anderson, always attempting a true epic and this time coming close. But Blood is an insipid epic. Anderson adapts Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil, partly in response to the blood-for-oil arguments about the Iraq War—as if going back to Sinclair’s fictionalized history of the U.S. oil industry explained anything about Americans’ dependence on energy and exploitation of their natural and spiritual resources. But Anderson’s argument isn’t muckraking or cogent. Plainview’s robber-baron immorality and atheism—the way he cheats a family out of its oil-rich land, his cut-throat competitiveness and inability to express love—do not represent the essence of American culture or industry. It’s just nihilistic reaching.
Ironically, Anderson enjoys unearned good will among today’s film nerds. Since the silly Boogie Nights sentimentalized the porn industry with a fake rubber penis, Anderson has been the small white hope for Gen-Xers wishing there was a Griffith, Stroheim, Ford, Wyler, Vidor or Stevens among them. It reveals the naive cynicism that infects today’s movie geeks. (Embarrassingly, There Will Be Blood won IndieWire’s online poll of real and wannabe critics yearning for a film that depicted America as land of the greedy and the home of the great Satan.) Yet, There Will Be Blood isn’t a unifying American epic like Giant or The Best Years of Our Lives; it’s the Worst Years of Our History, a post-Iraq War Termigant.
Anderson’s grandiose narrative gives the impression of depth when there’s only jumbled, surface breadth. It’s strange to watch a confidently-made film by a director who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Each dramatic segment is impressively paced—as if Anderson was showing Stevens how magnanimity ought to be done—but the result is piddling; inexpressive of universality. Have Anderson’s boosters noticed, there are virtually no women in this epic? No single contradiction to Plainview’s masculinist cruelty? None of the richness found in Gone With the Wind, Giant, The Sundowners, Sounder?
Yes, Blood has photographic detail. Cinematographer Robert Elswit records nature more tastefully than the great Roger Deakins’ show-offy work in the fake-epic Jesse James/Robert Ford, instilling genuine visionary heft. And Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood provides a wondrous emotive score, as eclectic as Carl Stalling and expressive as Max Steiner. Musical wit disguises the story’s incoherence—its meaningless siblings, silences and opportunistic sadism.
Yet, Anderson’s story becomes stupidly fashionable in its stacked contest of Plainview vs. Eli, capitalist ruthlessness vs. religious fanaticism. The shabby set-up of Plainview and Eli’s ultimate confrontation in a bowling alley is so confusing and slapdash that their symbolic clash—where one forces the other to confess his shallowness and deny his beliefs—comes across as just secular-progressive prejudice and loopy, unconvincing drama. Each man is a thesis position, not a character. Is There Will Be Blood an undeniable expose of American ruthlessness, or a formidable dramatization of the struggle between power and faith? No!
I can like a film for a variety of reasons. In fact, I take some measure of pride in that. To illustrate, some of my favorite directors include Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch, and Quentin Tarantino. All three directors have vastly different styles, all of which I admire for slightly different reasons. I love Tarkovsky’s slow, magical plod, Lynch’s alien atmospheric sense, and Tarantino’s storytelling and flare. As such, a film does not need to say a lot about societal conditions for me to like it, necessarily, I may add.
I tend to avoid movie reviews like dirt before I see any film. I had not read a lot about There Will Be Blood beyond it was based on Upton Sinclair’s ‘Oil’ (triggered in my mind social conscience thinker because of ‘The Jungle’). But I try, for the films while, to put aside the context, unless it’s needed or assumed (Inglourious Basterds).
After the film’s credits ended, There Will Be Blood struck me as a film with some great acting chops (DDL), beautiful cinematography, with a bleak story. It’s nothing more than that and nothing less. It didn’t strike me as brilliant, although the time surely flies watching it so that speaks to its immersive aptitude. I think little to no music, or rather, selective music scoring helped achieved a sense of realism.
My major beef with the film is the ending which struck me as abrupt and unpolished. The movie builds with a slowness and pleasure (morbid pleasure in the case of the subject, Daniel Plainview) and ends with a random medium shot, although I did understand seeing him on the floor as a reduced, “shell husk” of a person, to quote from above. All I wish was added was a closeup of Plainview’s face at the end, with a smile that fades into a dull scowl, then camera stays stationary, as Plainview stumbles up and walks away. Something more personal, because, after all, this was a film about Daniel Plainview.
Otherwise, a great film.
Without Daniel Day Lewis, TWBB would have been a minor film. An astounding performance.
There’s a lot of arcane talk about cinematic technique, so I will refrain from going into that. Yes, it is a “fashionable” metaphor featuring two special interest groups who are unreasonably powerful in America today – the recalcitrant oilmen and the aprioristically dogmatic right wing christians. PT Anderson’s critical achievement is that he humanizes the members of both these special interest groups. Far from legitimizing their respective agendas, what the movie does, in my opinion is demonstrate human corruptibility. It underscores human fragility and points out that the descent into madness (paranoid obsession/xenophobia) as a result of disparate factors such as emotional loss and a sense of insecurity, is merely a few steps away. The platonic ideal of the flawed human is far more referential of democracy than the noble human to me, but perhaps I’m betraying my political orientation here.
Some of the above posters have argued above that the characters are less complicated than in real life or the lack of central female characters is indicative of a general lack of nuance. I think those are straw men and not substantive arguments one way or another.
Why for instance does the “…shabby set-up of Plainview and Eli’s ultimate confrontation….(come) across as just secular-progressive prejudice and loopy, unconvincing drama”? This is clearly an opinion and not a well reasoned argument.
Also, the fact that it appears ‘masculinist’ in the general import of its thesis is because it is a deliberately not-so-subtle attempt to delineate the overarching patriarchy that our society is undoubtedly mired in. Perhaps that’s sophomoric, but there’s no real artistic problem with that. No one will disagree that men make the lion’s share of all critical decisions when all is said and done.
I think it is an important document, because I feel the the American left has lessons to learn from this. Maybe bipartisanship would have a fighting chance if we understood the reasons underpinning peoples’ insecurities objectively.
There first time I saw There Will Be Blood I didn’t like it, but when I watched it again last week I really liked it.
I don’t think it ever does try to say anything grandiose about humanity. The movie is entirely about the characters and the rise of the oil industry. The stage is set at the beginning of the movie with a western frontier filled with massive underground seas of oil just laying there that somebody will inevitably tap into and get rich off of. Everybody wants to get a piece of these riches, and the ultimate winner is the one who’s smartest and most devious and aggressive at grabbing it.
I also don’t agree about the themes of the corruption of the human soul. Daniel Plainview was always corrupt. He longed to have connections with other people, but he hated everything that wasn’t as aggressive and greedy as he was. He tried to make his son into another version of him, then when he lost his hearing he abandoned him because anything flawed could not be the kin he wanted. He thought he’d found somebody like him with the man claiming to be his brother, but then that man turned out to be weak and effeminate, and knew that couldn’t possibly be his brother. Finally, he gives up on trying to find anybody like him and sets up a situation where he doesn’t have to have any human contact at all.
Eli was everything Daniel despised. He was stupid, childish, and clung to faith as a sense of entitlement for everything to turn out well for him. He was also a hypocrite. He used dramatic flair and faith to gain himself a position of power in the town, but what he really wanted was to be as powerful as Daniel. That’s why after Daniel beats him up, he goes and beats up his father for selling the land to Daniel, and that’s why at the baptism ceremony he goes out of his way to humiliate Daniel. What Eli tried to do what the end was the most idiotic grab at power he could have possibly made, and Daniel wanted to show him what an idiot and a hypocrite he was. “You think you can do business with me as an equal? You’re NOT my equal. You’re a deluded moron and you’re garbage.”
If he’s trying to say anything about the human condition in general, he’s saying that it’s aggressive, greedy misanthropes who think they’re superior to everyone else like Daniel who rise to power because that’s what you need to be to win. And other human beings may envy him and wish they could be like him, but they’re nothing like him, and thank God for that.
The strength of the movie lies in the character performances and the illustration of the process of how big oil tycoons rose to power.
Essentialy TWBB is a film about a heartless man, a guy with no feelings whatsoever and the way this world of ours is actually a good place for such people. It also makes somer serious comments on religious fanaticism and mindless manipulation of people. The two main characters, one seemingly close to God and the other completely away from Him, are actually connected in their thirst for power and influence on others. It’s gritty and grim. One of the best films produced in recent years.
There Will Be Blood, for me, is a bit like crack. I had a little taste, then BAM. I’m addicted. This movie has everything going for it: incredible and innovative musical score, the acting of a god (Day-Lewis), Paul Dano (who kicks so much butt in this movie), and amazing writing and cinematography.
Le Feu Follet
I’m a big fan of P T Anderson, and I was excited when I heard about There Will Be Blood, but when I saw it it was a let-down for me. I love Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and most of all Punch-Drunk Love. I really like as well Daniel Day-Lewis, who I think was at his best in In The Name Of The Father, but for me in TWBB his performance was a bit over-wrought. TWBB is a story of an entrepreneur who wasn’t very nice to the people around him. At his best P T Anderson has communicated a shear joy of movie-making (the amazing opening take and the swimming pool scene of Boogie Nights) or the wit of Punch-Drunk Love. With Boogie Nights and Magnolia he is a good inheritor of the Altman influence. Where does TWBB fit into this? What is so good about it?