Dreadful. There Will Be Blood is just dreadful. It derives from a novel by Upton Sinclair, so in fairness it could only ever have been dreadful. There Will Be Blood presumes to be some searing indictment of oil and capitalism and America, but what it achieves is a reprise of Gangs of New York and Bill "The Butcher" Cutting; just another bombastic, braying, murderous madman, just another Daniel Day-Lewis psychopath picture.
Oil doesn't make "Daniel Plainview" a psychopath, much less America and its exchanges for goods and services. I defy anyone to watch that ordeal-by-cinema and tell me that Daniel Plainview would've been any more decent a human being had he not got into the oil business. Make him poor, make him a subsistence farmer, make him East Indian, and Daniel Plainview would be every bit as much a psychopath. It wasn't oil or capitalism or America that compelled Daniel Plainview to bludgeon the helpless pastor to death with a bowling pin. There Will Be Blood proves nothing more than that the Daniel Day-Lewis character is a psychopath.
There Will Be Blood is not an enjoyable two-and-a-half hours; it's meant to be unsettling, and there's no fun in a movie engineered to upset. Heaven forfend that Hollywood in the 21st Century produce a "serious" film that doesn't leave the viewer despairing of living. "Seriousness" in Hollywood since circa 1968 is too much measured by un-enjoyable-ness. But if a film isn't enjoyable then it had better achieve something of import, and There Will Be Blood is pointless.
The picture is presented with the affectations of the "sweeping historical epic" and "indictment of American society" or "portrait of the evils of oil" or some such rot. And the elite swallowed it as ever: eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture, and best film of the 2000s per prominent publications. But then, this was 2007-8, when those same elites were head-over-heels for another fancy nullity, this one running for president of the United States. They were unanimous about him, too; uniformly worshipful and uniformly wrong. It was some reassurance to read at Box Office Mojo that notwithstanding the accolades and awards, coinciding with its run in theaters, There Will Be Blood at the time of this writing worked out to Number 1,429 in all-time domestic box office receipts. You might say The Dark Knight drank There Will Be Blood's milkshake.
There Will Be Blood is shot artfully, and I'd be the first to commend its sort-of cinematic style, which doubtless will be aped transparently until its succession by some more novel trend. And Daniel Day-Lewis is a fine actor, particularly if you find indulgent bombast becoming in an actor. Though there must be a million actors who could've played a more real Daniel Plainview in a more true portrait, but those actors weren't in the right place at the right time or didn't attend the right school or don't know the right people, and so they toil in oblivion. But presentation and style don't make a film great any more than they make a president worthy of carving into Mount Rushmore.
The critics who venerated it and the industry insiders who decorated it were responding to the "great film" trappings and elite prejudice-affirmation in the picture. The Wikipedia entry on There Will Be Blood stipulates that the industry didn't cotton to the script: "the studios didn't think it had the scope of a major picture." The studios had it right the first time. And there you have it: strip away the "great film" affectations, and those same industry insiders who later would elevate There Will Be Blood to the pinnacle of human achievement dismissed that same film as pointless.
And when a "jury" of the American Film Institute inserts the most turgid rote-leftist ideology into a single-paragraph assessment of a movie, then one gets the idea that the politics of the film figured more than a little in the support for it by the establishment. AFI pronounced There Will Be Blood "a true meditation on America." Only if you imagine a cartoonish psychopath to be a precis for America, which of course is precisely how America is caricatured by radical, hard-Left America-haters, of which the American film industry has more than a few.
More from the AFI "jury": "The film drills down into the dark heart of capitalism, where domination, not gain, is the ultimate goal." Again, the only thing that film "drills down into" is the "dark heart" of a cartoonish psychopath. I can only guess that it's not to venture out too far onto a limb to pronounce that anyone associated with the composition of those words is not hard done by capitalism, and that my income in this year would strike them as an impossibility or a joke. But in their alternate universe, the decadent elite are the noble crusaders against the "dark heart of capitalism", and some impoverished nobody alternately shivering and sweating in a cheap apartment at a malfunctioning laptop would be part of the "system" that needs tearing down, if those elites believe in all the "right" things and that nobody is an unreconstructed believer in the goodness and greatness of America.
The Daniel Day-Lewis character is a caricature -- unreal, unbelievable, and unhinged -- and There Will Be Blood is a cartoon. I have no doubt that leftist elites imagine Daniel Plainview and the corrupt pastor character to be representative of oil-men, businessmen, pastors, and Americans more generally, and the universally congratulatory reviews of those elites confirm as much. But the leftist elite deal in caricatures. They know nothing of business or Christianity or indeed of America; they have set themselves apart from the reality of the world and are interested only in stereotypes and caricatures to affirm them in their ignorance and prejudice and contempt.
What the leftist elite mean by "challenging our assumptions" is of course "challenging your assumptions". They're not iconoclasts; they mean to replace your icons with their own. The salt-of-the-earth, all-American folks who actually do things are the ones to be pilloried, scorned, and damned, while all the hatreds of the elite are stroked and sanctified, even as they preach reverently about "challenging our assumptions" and "afflicting the comfortable", etc, etc. ad nauseam. There's no-one more self-righteous than a godless leftist elite.
If they weren't blinded so by their prejudices from seeing the movie plainly, those elites might recognize it to be too cartoonish to be a serious or understanding portrait. What do they teach in Creative Writing 101, about the danger in single dimensions? Villains without redeeming characteristics and flawless heroes make for an unreal story and a tedious one. Some conventions are useful, and that's one of them; any story that relies on this kind of Soviet poster cartoonery won't hold up, and makes a dreadful, dreary picture even on the first showing.
It might have been the better way, to dispense with the weighty and solemn self-seriousness of the movie and come at it as a burlesque. A very slight tweaking could have made a joke of the picture. "I drink your milkshake" is a fine line, and might've made a good departure point for reworking the movie as a comic enterprise. That line and the Daniel Day-Lewis character were taken up by Saturday Night Live at the time, and formed the basis for an entire sketch. An English film team especially might've concluded that the script was too cartoonish to make a properly serious film, and developed and expanded the cartoonish elements to make a romp of the thing. But these dreary moviemakers presumed to make a "big", "serious", "important" film. And when a caricature isn't put up to make the audience laugh then it'll surely make them groan. So if There Will Be Blood is not a roaring spoof, the Daniel Day-Lewis character can only be a psychopath. If Daniel Plainview isn't someone's idea of a joke, then all that's left is psychopathy.
Try this on: give Daniel Plainview a dog; make it a little one, and sweet, and with a silly, cutesy name. Then have Plainview dote on the little dog with equal force to his abuse for human beings. And then tweak the script and direction very slightly, so that Daniel Day-Lewis comes off more mad than malevolent. Every menacing word and turn of the head go from disturbing to hysterical. When it may be said of a movie that a little tweaking might convert it from "sweeping epic" and "indictment of society" to comic romp, then what you've got hold of is not the weighty picture that There Will Be Blood presumes to be.
Oil doesn't make "Daniel Plainview" a psychopath, much less America and its exchanges for goods and services. I defy anyone to watch that ordeal-by-cinema and tell me that Daniel Plainview would've been any more decent a human being had he not got into the oil business. Make him poor, make him a subsistence farmer, make him East Indian, and Daniel Plainview would be every bit as much a psychopath. It wasn't oil or capitalism or America that compelled Daniel Plainview to bludgeon the helpless pastor to death with a bowling pin. There Will Be Blood proves nothing more than that the Daniel Day-Lewis character is a psychopath.
There Will Be Blood is not an enjoyable two-and-a-half hours; it's meant to be unsettling, and there's no fun in a movie engineered to upset. Heaven forfend that Hollywood in the 21st Century produce a "serious" film that doesn't leave the viewer despairing of living. "Seriousness" in Hollywood since circa 1968 is too much measured by un-enjoyable-ness. But if a film isn't enjoyable then it had better achieve something of import, and There Will Be Blood is pointless.
The picture is presented with the affectations of the "sweeping historical epic" and "indictment of American society" or "portrait of the evils of oil" or some such rot. And the elite swallowed it as ever: eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture, and best film of the 2000s per prominent publications. But then, this was 2007-8, when those same elites were head-over-heels for another fancy nullity, this one running for president of the United States. They were unanimous about him, too; uniformly worshipful and uniformly wrong. It was some reassurance to read at Box Office Mojo that notwithstanding the accolades and awards, coinciding with its run in theaters, There Will Be Blood at the time of this writing worked out to Number 1,429 in all-time domestic box office receipts. You might say The Dark Knight drank There Will Be Blood's milkshake.
There Will Be Blood is shot artfully, and I'd be the first to commend its sort-of cinematic style, which doubtless will be aped transparently until its succession by some more novel trend. And Daniel Day-Lewis is a fine actor, particularly if you find indulgent bombast becoming in an actor. Though there must be a million actors who could've played a more real Daniel Plainview in a more true portrait, but those actors weren't in the right place at the right time or didn't attend the right school or don't know the right people, and so they toil in oblivion. But presentation and style don't make a film great any more than they make a president worthy of carving into Mount Rushmore.
The critics who venerated it and the industry insiders who decorated it were responding to the "great film" trappings and elite prejudice-affirmation in the picture. The Wikipedia entry on There Will Be Blood stipulates that the industry didn't cotton to the script: "the studios didn't think it had the scope of a major picture." The studios had it right the first time. And there you have it: strip away the "great film" affectations, and those same industry insiders who later would elevate There Will Be Blood to the pinnacle of human achievement dismissed that same film as pointless.
And when a "jury" of the American Film Institute inserts the most turgid rote-leftist ideology into a single-paragraph assessment of a movie, then one gets the idea that the politics of the film figured more than a little in the support for it by the establishment. AFI pronounced There Will Be Blood "a true meditation on America." Only if you imagine a cartoonish psychopath to be a precis for America, which of course is precisely how America is caricatured by radical, hard-Left America-haters, of which the American film industry has more than a few.
More from the AFI "jury": "The film drills down into the dark heart of capitalism, where domination, not gain, is the ultimate goal." Again, the only thing that film "drills down into" is the "dark heart" of a cartoonish psychopath. I can only guess that it's not to venture out too far onto a limb to pronounce that anyone associated with the composition of those words is not hard done by capitalism, and that my income in this year would strike them as an impossibility or a joke. But in their alternate universe, the decadent elite are the noble crusaders against the "dark heart of capitalism", and some impoverished nobody alternately shivering and sweating in a cheap apartment at a malfunctioning laptop would be part of the "system" that needs tearing down, if those elites believe in all the "right" things and that nobody is an unreconstructed believer in the goodness and greatness of America.
The Daniel Day-Lewis character is a caricature -- unreal, unbelievable, and unhinged -- and There Will Be Blood is a cartoon. I have no doubt that leftist elites imagine Daniel Plainview and the corrupt pastor character to be representative of oil-men, businessmen, pastors, and Americans more generally, and the universally congratulatory reviews of those elites confirm as much. But the leftist elite deal in caricatures. They know nothing of business or Christianity or indeed of America; they have set themselves apart from the reality of the world and are interested only in stereotypes and caricatures to affirm them in their ignorance and prejudice and contempt.
What the leftist elite mean by "challenging our assumptions" is of course "challenging your assumptions". They're not iconoclasts; they mean to replace your icons with their own. The salt-of-the-earth, all-American folks who actually do things are the ones to be pilloried, scorned, and damned, while all the hatreds of the elite are stroked and sanctified, even as they preach reverently about "challenging our assumptions" and "afflicting the comfortable", etc, etc. ad nauseam. There's no-one more self-righteous than a godless leftist elite.
If they weren't blinded so by their prejudices from seeing the movie plainly, those elites might recognize it to be too cartoonish to be a serious or understanding portrait. What do they teach in Creative Writing 101, about the danger in single dimensions? Villains without redeeming characteristics and flawless heroes make for an unreal story and a tedious one. Some conventions are useful, and that's one of them; any story that relies on this kind of Soviet poster cartoonery won't hold up, and makes a dreadful, dreary picture even on the first showing.
It might have been the better way, to dispense with the weighty and solemn self-seriousness of the movie and come at it as a burlesque. A very slight tweaking could have made a joke of the picture. "I drink your milkshake" is a fine line, and might've made a good departure point for reworking the movie as a comic enterprise. That line and the Daniel Day-Lewis character were taken up by Saturday Night Live at the time, and formed the basis for an entire sketch. An English film team especially might've concluded that the script was too cartoonish to make a properly serious film, and developed and expanded the cartoonish elements to make a romp of the thing. But these dreary moviemakers presumed to make a "big", "serious", "important" film. And when a caricature isn't put up to make the audience laugh then it'll surely make them groan. So if There Will Be Blood is not a roaring spoof, the Daniel Day-Lewis character can only be a psychopath. If Daniel Plainview isn't someone's idea of a joke, then all that's left is psychopathy.
Try this on: give Daniel Plainview a dog; make it a little one, and sweet, and with a silly, cutesy name. Then have Plainview dote on the little dog with equal force to his abuse for human beings. And then tweak the script and direction very slightly, so that Daniel Day-Lewis comes off more mad than malevolent. Every menacing word and turn of the head go from disturbing to hysterical. When it may be said of a movie that a little tweaking might convert it from "sweeping epic" and "indictment of society" to comic romp, then what you've got hold of is not the weighty picture that There Will Be Blood presumes to be.
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