It couldn’t last. The last three films I’ve seen–Doubt, Gran Torino, and American Gangster–have all been excellent. That’s a great streak for me, and one I had hoped to continue. With the amount of critical acclaim it has garnered, and my own past experience with Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, There Will Be Blood seemed like the perfect choice to continue the winning streak. But, you know, best laid plans . . .
[Spoilers follow:] Daniel Day Lewis is part of the problem. I really liked him in In the Name of the Father, and I respect him in general, but I often don’t enjoy his work. His gift for depicting extreme emotional states is a blessing and a curse. Here, it works marvelously in the baptism scene and ridiculously in the final scene. But, since Paul Dano indulges in the same sorts of excesses in the same film, I lay the blame with the director.
The pace of the film is a second problem, and I say that as someone who enjoys long films and who generally indulges directors who need more space to tell a story. Anderson is clearly attempting to create an epic here, and epics are long. But that, so far as I can tell, is the only justification for the film’s length. There are lavishly beautiful scenes, but the pace of the film is so tiring that it becomes hard to enjoy them or even, truly, to see them.
These are trivialities, though. The real problems are character, character development, and theme. With respect to character, there are two problems, the first is that both the main character (Lewis’ Daniel Plainview) and his antagonist (Dano’s Eli Sunday) are entirely static. We learn early in the film that Plainview’s ambition and singular focus on accumulation of wealth trump all other concerns. We learn quickly that, except for the glimpses of love between him and his adoptive son, he is heartless. Everyone else, everything else, is a means to an end.
It’s hard to build a two-and-a-half hour movie around characters who don’t change and whose lack of the potential for change is fairly clearly demonstrated before we’ve even known them very long. There’s no mystery to be revealed. There’s no deeper understanding about the characters that dawns on us over time.
It’s even harder to build a two-and-a-half hour movie focused almost entirely on a static character who is also utterly despicable. The emotional connection between Plainview and his son, W. H., is truly touching and would be enough to fuel an entire movie. But that relationship fades into the background after W. H.’s injury–at which point he is damaged goods and no longer of much interest to his father. Plainview is a soulless monster, but not a particularly interesting one. We might get some perverse pleasure from examining him as a case study if his prime motivation were not so obvious. But, there are no depths to plumb here. There’s no tension between Plainview the man and Plainview the monster. They are one. Plainview isn’t human enough to require or justify any emotional investment on the part of the audience.
That brings us to theme, and this is, for me at least, the weakest part of the entire film. That a conflict exists between the fanatically pious Sunday and the fanatically ambitious Plainview is as obvious as their nearly allegorical names. Unfortunately, the conflict is so forced and they themselves are such obvious types (rather than living, breathing, characters) that it never comes off. Anderson gets so wrapped up in lavish shots and Plainview-as-character-study that what could be a unifying element becomes, instead, the clearest indicator of the film’s incoherence.