There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson 2007)
Posted on March 18 at 11.35, 2008 by Eric Mahleb
‘I drink your milkshake…I drink it up!’
This innocuous line spoken towards the end of There Will be Blood by Daniel Plainview, the character played by Daniel Day Lewis, captures in the way it is delivered, the strange, powerful, sometimes magnificent but most often disturbing tone and atmosphere that permeates Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film.
An epic about oil, greed, good and evil, and, really, about nihilism, There Will be Blood is a troubling piece that resembles Requiem for A Dream (2000) in its desire, to quote more or less accurately something that Aronofsky once said about his film, ‘to throw you from a window and then once you are dying on the pavement, to throw a piano on top of you’.
The first 20 minutes of the film, which contain no dialogue, set the tone for what is a deeply unusual and remarkable film that makes a few statements with the power to draw contemporary comparisons, but that decides to keep them somewhat obscured in favour of an explosion of hatred, loneliness and ugliness. Surely, one can’t watch this film and be satisfied that it is simply about greed, capitalism and a loss of certain values that are pertinent to 21st century society (as they were already 100 years ago).
This lack of a clear message, as well as a haunting score and a very unlikeable protagonist (albeit so charismatic that we can’t take our eyes off him – enough has been said about Day-Lewis’s astonishing performance) who is the sole focus and the only fully developed character in the entire film, has disturbed many viewers and critics, depriving them of a traditional frame through which to appraise the film.
There is little doubt that There Will be Blood is not a standard film. Paul Thomas Anderson has delivered a work that is ambitious, different, and that pushes the envelop of traditional filmmaking. In the process, it asks the viewer to allow for a different type of experience to come through, one that is not always ‘pleasant’ but that certainly shows a high level of creativity and craftsmanship.
I love cinema because good movies take me to places in my self that I don’t always visit in real life. A good film for me is a film that knows how to tickle a part of my brain and arouse all sorts of emotions. These don’t have to be as simple as happiness or sadness or fright or laughter. It can be something else, something gray, something in between, something uncomfortable. In There Will be Blood, Anderson and Day-Lewis succeed magnificently in taking us to a place where cinema rarely goes, and they do so through a mastery of all the filmmaking ingredients, although in degrees and combinations that stand outside of usual conventions.
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