There Will Be Blood (2007) - C

I went to see "There Will Be Blood" full of hope. The film has been getting amazing reviews and tons of Oscar buzz, and I'm a fan of director Paul Thomas Anderson. I'm one of those people who liked "Magnolia" as well as "Boogie Nights," and I loved "Punch Drunk Love." Unfortunately, I found "There Will Be Blood" to be a major letdown.

Now Daniel Day-Lewis is his usual brilliant self as Daniel Plainview, an oil prospector in the late 1890's and early 1900's. His character is fairly interesting, especially his relationship with his son, and I really enjoyed the scenes of his prospecting work, and getting a sense of just how dirty and dangerous oil drilling is. It was also fun to watch how the oil drilling business develops over the years as it takes off--in one early scene I was amazed and appalled to see them bringing oil up by the buckets, literally, and dumping the buckets of oil into a pit dug into the ground.

Unfortunately, the script largely wastes Daniel Day-Lewis's fine work. Despite the fact that he won a Golden Globe for Best Actor, I can't rank this amongst his best portrayals simply because the script doesn't let him really show any growth, insight, or development in his character. Despite the fact that 30 years pass during the movie, you almost feel like you are watching a character trapped in amber. You get a fascinating snapshot of the man, but it simply isn't satisfying in the end since the character is so static. This is one of my major points of contention with many traditional reviewers and award givers. Plainview is an extremely flashy character to portray, but in the end the performance rings hollow to me...it feels like a clever trick instead of a fully fleshed out person. Other famous (and Oscar winning) examples of this phenomenon are Dustin Hoffman's character in "Rainman" and Nicolas Cage's character in "Leaving Las Vegas." Like Plainview, those characters are showy and exciting, but they're just one note characters. I love portrayals where you see the character grow or transform, where you get more than a single tone, no matter how brilliant that one tone is.

I also felt that the final act of "There Will Be Blood" was extremely disappointing. The actions of the characters felt rather arbitrary and disjointed to me. I definitely felt like I had suddenly been thrown into another movie, one of much lower quality than the beginning 80% of the movie. My reaction to the so called "resolution" of the movie was one of puzzlement and frustration. I walked out feeling "Really...that's how you're going to end it?" If you're a gamer geek like me, you'll probably remember the random dungeon generator that was included in some early versions of the Dungeon Master's Guide. I felt like the end of the movie was generated by a random script generator.

In the end, there was enough good stuff in the early parts of the movie that I can't say the movie sucked, but I definitely would recommend that people take a pass on this one.

Final Grade: C