There Will Be Blood
As I just said in the Michael Clayton comments, sometimes a movie I go into expecting two hours of torture will fare better in my esteem merely by not sucking as much as I’d expected it to, and it’s possible that that’s the case with There Will Be Blood. It’s close to three hours long, which is an automatic two strikes against it, for me; it’s P.T. Anderson, which is, like, six strikes against it; I fully expected another Gangs Of New York-type scenery-guzzling performance from Day-Lewis; and, you know, the milkshake line. And the last line of the film, which nailed the lid shut on my pre-hatred months ago — it’s everything I can’t stand about Anderson, clever but not thought through, pleased with itself in the abstract but meaningless in context. I think most of the other people in the theater yesterday were on the same page; the minute the film cut to the bowling alley, the audience tittered all, “Yep, here we go.”
But I was wrong. The movie is very very good. I didn’t like it all that much, which might not seem to follow, but I feel the same way about Raging Bull, actually — good writing, good acting, don’t ever need to see it again. Doesn’t speak to me.
There Will Be Blood had a similar effect — or lack of, I guess — and it’s like Mr. Stupidhead said last night: when he got to the end of it, he found himself wondering why he’d been told this story. He wasn’t sure why he was supposed to care; it didn’t seem to him like the movie cared that much about these people its own self, like it cared more about the situation than about its characters. My chief complaint about Anderson’s work to date is that he comes up with out-there premises or scenes and works backward from them, but he’s more concerned with the engineering than he is with investing us in the characters. It all feels stuck in his head, theoretical, the compulsories versus the long program, and when he gets particularly show-offy with the filters or lighting a transition weirdly, or everybody’s singing Aimee Mann, it’s like, well, congratulations, but…who gives a shit. Technique is great, but you’ve got to put some soul into it.
That’s probably his most off-putting quality as a filmmaker, and it is still an issue here. Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance is legitimately great, much quieter and more elastic than I’d expected, but the movie relies entirely on that performance to create (the few) recognizably human moments; the script, the story itself, is about pictures and places, not people. (And N.P. Thompson’s description of the score — that Greenwood “writes music as if he learned everything he knows about composing by taking a brickbat to hornets’ nests” — is dead on. I don’t care for Radiohead anyway; the soundtrack is downright intrusive.)
I have to give Anderson credit for getting his more egregious filmmaking instincts in hand; the movie is a pleasure to look at, and while the storytelling is over-intellectualized, it’s also tightly controlled visually, which is a nice change. The transitions and edits are more sensible, less random. It’s too long, but the pacing works, and there isn’t that feeling that certain scenes kind of bulge out while others get rushed through. It’s not unapologetically precious.
It’s a relief to have Anderson’s hallmark overpraised-child contrivance subtracted, but I wonder what’s left in the equation, then. Salon‘s Stephanie Zacharek put it neatly:
[There Will Be Blood] is an austere folly, a picture so ambitious, so filled with filmmaking, that its very scale almost obscures its blankness…. An epic stands or falls on the strength of its emotional details, and by that measure, There Will Be Blood, sprawling and grand as it tries to be, fails.
I could say that about any Anderson picture, really. “Insubstantial” is not quite the right word, but…I forget who said it, but there’s a famous quotation about the personal and the universal in storytelling, that good writing makes a personal story universal, while bad writing aims for universal right out of the gate and ends up not applying to anyone.
The film is an achievement, not least because of the progress it represents, but I think this is the best Anderson can do, and I still didn’t love it, because it wasn’t made to be loved. It was made to be admired. That’s not why I watch movies, so: we’re done here.
Tags: movies sites writing
*Technique is great, but you’ve got to put some soul into it.*
Sars, you just wrote what I have always thought but didn’t know how to put into words. Thank you!!
“the soundtrack is downright intrusive”
Thank you. I haven’t been that distracted by a film’s score since the dreck Clint Eastwood wrote for Mystic River. I do like Radiohead, but Greenwood’s got some stuff to learn about writing for film.
I went into this not expecting to like it; the only thing of Anderson’s I’d seen was Magnolia which I loathed, despite it starring many of my favourite actors. And I wasn’t blown away by Day-Lewis; he was good, for sure, but I didn’t think he was better than Clooney or Depp. But I was seriously surprised by the film itself – everything after the scene between Plainview and grown-up H.W. could have been cut, but otherwise, I was impressed almost against my will, and I came out thinking “Dammit, I may just have lost my office Oscar pool.”
I liked this better than that, but my opinion of Anderson is better than yours in general (the only thing of his I really disliked was Magnolia — I loved Hard Eight and Boogie Nights and I liked Punch Drunk Love but I didn’t think it was really great, I just liked it). I’m also way more patient and willing to accept technique as a virtue of its own, but I get that that’s a matter of taste.
It does live and die by Day-Lewis’s performance, and I do agree with what you said that it’s hard to tell why you were told the story. I don’t need to be invested in the characters, per se, but it’s really an overblown character study, so it’s confusing.
I agree about the soundtrack 120%. That was the biggest detractor of this movie for me. I enjoyed the movie greatly, but really feel that Paul Dano’s performance was overlooked.
“… the script, the story itself, is about pictures and places, not people.” I think this nicely sums up my own objections to the movie. Part of my problem was that the thing was three hours long and I was not sitting in a particularly comfy chair. The other part was that the characters were almost completely opaque to me; story-wise, there was seldom any real build-up to events (he’s hitting that guy why? Wait — he hates all — when did this happen?). Things just happened, apparently at random because we’d been deprived of half the buildup.
On a nitpicking note, I also found the deaf son’s complete inability to communicate hard to buy. He didn’t have to know sign language to be capable of basic charades.
What Mr. Stupidhead said is exactly what I was thinking the whole time. I was sitting there during the movie trying to think of how I was going to word my feelings about this movie to other people. Its not quite that it was pointless, or that there was no plot, but just quite simply, no answer to the question of why I needed to know about this story and these people.
The only film out of the Best Picture category (excluding No Country, which I havent seen) that didn’t leave me asking this question to some extent was Atonement, which is why I was rooting for it against all the odds. I guess Best Original Score will have to do.
Man, PT… one of the few things my fiancee and I disagree on heatedly are the merits of Magnolia. He thinks it’s a poignant picture of connected people who feel isolated, I think it’s boring as hell and cannot be saved by it’s spectacular soundtrack alone.
Anyway.
I can’t decide if I want to see There Will Be Blood, if only because Day-Lewis’s immersive character actor… thing kind of annoys me. Is that wrong?
WORD to Mr. Stupidhead! That was the first thing I said when the lights in the theatre came up. The next thing I said was, “Oh, this was PT Anderson? No wonder I hated it.”*
I had so many issues with this film, I had a hard time knowing where to begin, so thank you for putting them all so eloquently. The only thing I liked was Paul Dano; his performance became all the more impressive when I found out he learned a part in, like, a week. Daniel Day-Lewis had a year and a half to work out all the kinks.
(I always thought I was the only person who didn’t like ‘Magnolia’. I feel so much better after reading these comments!)
All that! Plus, Eli was no contendor. It made the movie seem yet more senseless, with an antagonist who was clearly, unchangingly, unworthy of going head-to-head with Plainview. It made the whole conclusion stupid, not tragic.
“On a nitpicking note, I also found the deaf son’s complete inability to communicate hard to buy. He didn’t have to know sign language to be capable of basic charades.”
God, for real. Also, does the kid (and his father) not know how to *write shit down*? For God’s sake, people! Get a notepad and a pencil! The child is 11 years old… he can read a note! Argh, I say.
Funny thing, opinions. The one thing I disliked most about the film was Paul Dano’s performance. During the heated preachy moments I kept thinking, “geez, could this kid push any harder? “, I felt he tried too hard and it came off contrived and not organic. And while I thought the bowling alley scene was overlong and overdone, Dano was no match for Daniel. But I loved Jonny Greenwood’s score. It was so different than anything I’ve heard before (like all the swelling violin crap that takes over John Williams-type scores). Ah well, to-may-toes/ to-mah-toes…
re: Personal v Universal
Amy Sherman-Palladino always talks about the saying the writers at Roseanne had: Make the big little and the little big.
A good rule of thumb.
Unless you’re Michael By.
Thank you. I thought the performances were great. (Although, when I first saw the previews for the movie, I wondered if it was a prequel to Gangs of New York since Bill the Butcher died.) But I hated the movie. I felt imprisoned by it, and couldn’t wait for it to end.