There Will Be Blood – 2 Disc Edition
Reviewer: Tim Isaac
Issue 104 June 2008
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Black gold.
The Lowdown: Daniel Plainview is an oilman. When a young man comes to him saying the black gold in bubbling from the ground on his family’s farm, it sets Plainview on a odyssey that sees him amass wealth, pit himself against a charismatic young preacher and head towards the brink of madness.
Review: I can never decide whether Daniel Day Lewis is a great actor or not. Rather like Laurence Olivier, he’s absolutely magnetic while you’re watching him, but afterwards it’s difficult not to feel there’s something a bit hammy about him. Day Lewis doesn’t really act, he performs. It’s electric to watch and there’s no doubt he’s the beating heart of There Will Be Blood, but with his John Huston-esque inflections and the way he chews every sentence, he’s very noticeably acting. While in other films it’s been slightly distracting (for example, despite the adulation and Oscar nomination, he chewed the scenery horrifically in Gangs Of New York), it works for There Will Be Blood.
Daniel Day Lewis’ performance allows Daniel Plainview to live somewhere in the netherworld between man and monster, which is exactly what the film needs. While Plainview is a palpable human being with needs and desires, what the movie really needs him to be is a force, something that will sweep away all the traits of American optimism and sentimentality, to reveal a festering boil of greed, manipulation and hatred, which always seems poised to burst. It’s for this reason that while the ending of the movie has annoyed many and bewildered others, it’s the only real conclusion of what’s happened over the previous two and a half hours. Rather like a more unhinged version Charles Foster Kane, Plainview’s obsessions leave him constantly teetering on the brink of explosion. It’s just a matter of whether it’s an explosion of madness, violence or something else.
As well as Day Lewis, much credit has to go to director Paul Thomas Anderson, who had already shown himself one of the most interesting and complex directors around with Boogie Nights and Magnolia, but breaks new ground with There Will Be Blood. While both those earlier movies were formally complex and reached for grand ideas that they only intermittently managed to fully grasp, There Will Be Blood goes for a much more classical narrative, layering the complexity in the themes and visual style. The film may initially seem far simpler story-wise than Boogie Nights or Magnolia, but in totality, There Will Be Blood is a far more impressive achievement.
The two-disc edition comes with a few deleted scenes and a montage of some of the research that went into making the film, but the main extra is a 1923 silent movie called ‘The Story Of Petroleum’. This black and white effort looks at the oil business in the 1920s, showing that a lot of what goes on in There Will Be Blood isn’t all that far from the truth. It was, after all, an era that changed America forever, and it isn’t hard to see the man/monster embodied by Plainview still reverberating through America.
FILM: 8 EXTRAS: 6
DVD Info:
US Certificate: R
Starring: Daniel Day Lewis, Paul Dano, Kevin J O’Connor, Ciaran Hinds
Directed By: Paul Thomas Anderson
Distributor: Paramount
Audio: Dolby Digital 5.1
Visuals: 2.35:1 Anamorphic Widescreen
Running Time: 158 mins
Price: £19.99
Film ordered through: USDirect.co.uk – 01484 325 605
Special Features:
Scene Selection
’15 Minutes’ Featurette
Trailers
Deleted Scenes
‘The Story Of Petroleum’ Silent Movie
