April 12, 2008 – If you're headed out to see “There Will be Blood,” a word of caution: be prepared. By all reports, it isn’t for the faint of heart.
"The first time I saw this beautiful beast of a movie from director-writer Paul Thomas Anderson, I felt gut-punched," says Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. "Some people winced during the first fifteen minutes of wordless darkness as Daniel Day-Lewis, deep in a mine shaft in the choking heat of New Mexico, painstakingly digs silver ore out of stubborn rock."
Roger Ebert was similarly affected, "Watching the movie is like viewing a natural disaster that you cannot turn away from. By that I do not mean that the movie is bad, any more than it is good. It is a force beyond categories."
Day-Lewis received this year's Academy Award for best actor in his portrayal of Daniel Plainview, a man driven by forces he either cannot, or will not, control. After his experience in the silver mine, he turns his mania to oil, and extracts enough to make him a very rich man, a man who Ebert says becomes, "a great oversize monster who hates all men, including therefore himself."
The movie is loosely based on Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel, “Oil”, but Anderson goals differ from Sinclair's. Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe says, "The novel is a merry-go-round with too many horses. Anderson has pared away the dozens of characters (starlets, other oil magnates, more religious folk)….he also ditches the wishful editorializing that so thrilled Sinclair."
Morris says, "Anderson puts us right up close to everything else in this great big funny, scary, deliriously one-of-a-kind movie. The flabbergasting photography is by Robert Elswit; and Jonny Greenwood, of Radiohead, did the movie's churning, horror-film soundscape." (Elswit won the Academy Award for cinematography.)
Plainview is a man who has no friends, nor lover and no real partners, according to Ebert. He has an adopted son, H. W. Plainview (Dillon Freasier), whom he mostly exploits as a prop.
Plainveiw gets his big break when a young man, Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) tells him that his daddy has oil land and offers to take him to it. When he gets to the property they are accosted by Eli Sunday (also played by Paul Dano). He wants Plainview to give him $10,000 to build a church, the Church of the Third Revelation.
Ebert says, "Plainview goes along with Eli until the time comes to dedicate his first well. He has promised to allow Eli to bless it, but when the moment comes he pointedly ignores the youth, and a lifelong hatred is founded." The movie focuses on the two personalities vying for domination, and much, much more.
"What we're watching, with thrilling rapture, is a director building a movie the old-fashioned way: with his hands," Morris says. "Dirt cakes the fingernails. Oil smears the camera lens.
"The work we're seeing men do – the heaving, pulling, climbing, pouring, waiting – is exhilarating in part because it's so manual," he continues. "I marveled at some of the labor being done on-screen and thought of Abel Gance, D.W. Griffith, and King Vidor, how those men built epics out of the cumulative force of real on-screen horsepower. Anderson's movie takes full advantage of its medium to show us the infernal birth of an industry."
Though Ebert suggests in his review (written before the Oscars), that Day-Lewis should thank the legendary John Huston should he win the award, what Day-Lewis said was, "That's the closest I'll ever come to getting a knighthood. My deepest thanks to the members of the Academy for whacking me with the handsomest bludgeon in town."
The movie runs 158 minutes and is rated R for some violence. It is playing at Market Square East.