There Will Be Blood (2007)
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Plot Discussion Below - Spoilers
I kept going back to this movie every few years because I wasn't mentally accepting of it's qualities. Recently I've felt able to take it in again and assess it properly.
Though I do not feel that this is a very important story, I enjoyed this film a lot. It's slow but never dull. The music employs an odd percussiveness and pizzicato string section that pours a tense molasses-like nausea over the proceedings.
Daniel Day-Lewis portrays a straightforward but terrifying tycoon impossibly well. His slow descent into madness and self realization followed by a blinding denial is amazing. His nemesis is any form of competition, namely himself. The smart people are well advised to keep their distance from him, not least of which his son, who was deafened early on in his young life by an explosion of virgin oil spring.
Tycoon Plainview has his shlt list, and at the top of this list is a vain charlatan priest who taunts Lewis's character from day one, starting with a finder's fee, and later with guilt trips. Plainview relaxedly dismisses and snubs this priest, later physically punishing him like a rag doll, because he knows, and he has known, that this man of God is just a boy. A prickly, bothersome, self centered snake in the grass. He has no respect for him, and his satanic tendencies are able to be carried out in half swing, throughout a strong decade of resentment, until the bell tolls for both of them.
Anderson's direction is as bold and precise as any great director of the ages. How else can an actor with chops like Lewis inhabit such a beast man without a freedom and commitment from a director who knows exactly how to milk his cast, and how to capture such nuance in his characters, right down to the demonic growl of a whisky and nicotine stained vocal chord, bubbling like cold oil at the thought of a son becoming a sole entity for oil drilling?
That's a long question, and this is a long movie. It's a drawn out study and a dirty little comedy. It's true that Daniel Day embodies that of a Larry David persona so well when he spouts out his well sharpened dialog, just as Paul Dano's possessed man child voice frying gets under the skin so much that one cannot help but start giggling. Many may think that this is solely a dramatic work, but a closer inspection reveals that Anderson's writing is filled with jokes and riffs that simply cannot have been concocted without a madman sense of humor.
I picture PTA up late at night, after a few too many lines of cocaine, furiously writing and laughing passionately with a charcoal crayon over plain white paper, sweating, drinking, talking on the phone set to speaker, using a yes man personal assistant as a spring board. Someone paid to listen and agree. This may not be enough. Paul is too smart to think yes man agrees with him. So he writes the bit about Plainview getting deeply disturbed that his alleged brother has not laughed at his joke concerning prostitutes getting liquored up. He hangs up and calls Daniel Day Lewis's agent at 1:30 A.M.
The next morning, there's an answering machine message from Lewis's agent. He'd like to come talk to Paul and be there for script development.
This may seem far fetched, but judging from this film and how it plays out, I cannot imagine anything much less than something as extravagant as that happening in the creative process of this critic proof film.
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