I hate to vex you, because I know you love Daniel Day-Lewis, but I wasn’t a big fan of There Will Be Blood.
I wanted to like it. I mean, it wasn’t horrible: the period set design and costumes, cinematography and special effects are all top-drawer. And Day-Lewis is perfect as a paranoid monomaniac. But he stays that way, with few surprises and a foretold conclusion; in the absence of a branched storyline, he is the movie, a sputtering, mustachioed black hole for plot and character development. Most of the “pivotal scenes,” especially those between Day-Lewis and the smirking, sphere-headed young preacher Paul Dano, are so top-heavy with overacting, it was like Jack Nicholson barking “You can’t handle the truth” at me over and over again. There was much presumably unintended laughter from the audience.
Also, I remain undecided whether Jonny Greenwood’s often discordant, glissando-rich score is a good thing and this from a guy who roots for Radiohead and its associated endeavors. It didn’t fit at times, while other times it did. Sometimes I didn’t notice it and other times it was equal parts hornets and air-raid sirens in my head. I’m going to lean toward the Philip Glass end of my Musical Score Love Scale and claim that I didn’t like it, slightly.
I’m also going to let you in on a little secret: I am not a big Paul Thomas Anderson fan, as a writer or as a director. Hot air and half-baked new-age sentiment bloat his screenplays, his movies and he himself. At least There Will Be Blood has an irredeemable, vengeful, near-satanic oilman up front, which will hold my interest longer than Adam Sandler buying pudding. (And with Day-Lewis as I described, is the tale of Daniel Plainview an allegory of our president, as some reviewers have theorized? I guess with some creative leaps of interpretation it is. But leaps like those land inevitably in college-essay territory, wherein we have explicated Moby-Dick as a stand-in for slavery, Manifest Destiny or penis envy.)
I’d call the puffy enterprise a moderately good movie inflated by marketing as Oscar Bait. My post-show giddiness was nowhere near the levels of critical acclaim this thing’s been garnering. Maybe I’m missing something. Let me know what you think if you’ve seen it. I, too, may be puffed up by marketing.