Review

Review Date: 13-January-08
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

There Will Be Blood (2007)

In the past I have felt that Paul Thomas Anderson could speak directly to my soul. The maker of Boogie Nights and Magnolia has awed me with distinctive tales of family and personal redemption. Yet he has lost me with There Will Be Blood. Don't get me wrong — Anderson's first period epic is an impressive piece of work, thanks largely to Daniel Day-Lewis' towering performance and the director's typically masterful use of music, but I do not understand what it is about. Watching it, I kept trying to shake the star's considerable spell and tie together the threads about fathers and sons or about greed and religion, the motivation and rationale of American life. The threads resist satisfactory tying, and for me that is a problem.

Set in the beginning of the last century, There Will Be Blood is the story of a man large enough for an epic. We first see Daniel Plainview scratching in the California earth hoping to strike it rich. He is clearly someone who will stop at nothing. After several years he has built up a successful business with his own sweat and toil, along with a crew of loyal men, and has forged a tender if unsentimental bond with a son (Dillon Freasier) whose presence helps soften his public image. The story really gets underway as Daniel drills a well beneath the barren soil of a remote settlement whose citizens are highly religious. They are led by a young evangelist named Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), an enigmatic character who generally appears either pathetic or repulsive. His zealousness bespeaks an ambition similar to the oilman's (similarly exaggerated, similarly egotistic), and a lopsided rivalry begins.

Or does it? The puny man of god is no match for the older, crueler mogul, so it is both understandable and frustrating when the plot suddenly pushes Eli aside and concentrates on Daniel's personal woes and slackening grip on sanity. His relationship with his son takes a wrong turn, and he attempts to fill the void with booze and questionable associations, giving the acerbity that drives his ambition full rein. Day-Lewis figures hugely in nearly every scene, as impossible to ignore on film as his character would be in real life. Daniel is so powerful a force that he almost asks to be viewed as a twisted old-timer better left buried and ignored; as if what he does to his son and the preacher is not indicative of human nature but his nature. I suppose his story writhes to the conclusion that the motivation and rationale of American life are often empty. There Will Be Blood is not empty, nor is it as full as it might be.

Copyright © 2008 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.