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Street Date: April 8
Official Synopsis:
This widely acclaimed masterpiece and must see American epic features the Academy Award wining performance of Daniel Day-Lewis (Best Actor, 2007). Daniel Plainview and son are independent oil men, looking for prospects in California at the turn of the 20th century. They are challenged by a young preacher, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), whose own ambition is matched by Plainview's. Their battle forms the center of a scary, darkly comic historical journey into an abyss of madness "There Will Be Blood is Paul Thomas Anderson's epic American nightmare, belching fire and brimstone and damnation to hell. It is, above all, a consummate work of art" (Manahola Dargis, The New York Times).
Our Take:
As much as I loved No Country For Old Men, there’s just no way it should have beaten There Will Be Blood for the Best Picture Academy Award. For all the talk about No Country’s ambiguous ending, the fact remains that the film is a fairly traditional action/suspense film, albeit a terrific one that does break some conventions. But Paul Thomas Anderson’s magnum opus redefines the epic movie; he almost completely reinvents filmmaking in the 21st century.
Take, for example, the infamous speech that is the first dialogue heard in the film (almost 15 minutes in!) While Daniel Day-Lewis delivers one of the single most enrapturing speeches in the history of speech-giving, Anderson uses only three cuts throughout the entire three-minute sequence. Even when the crowd roars up with questions and yelling, Anderson doesn’t cut away from the close-up of Day-Lewis. Any other filmmaker would have had 37 edits in that speech, cutting back and forth between Plainview and the crowd, but Anderson realizes that he’s captured lightning in a bottle with Day-Lewis’ performance, and he lets the camera sit still while the actor does the work. It lets the scene become completely hypnotic, and I have to say that that opening speech (which I watched over and over again when I got the DVD) now counts as one of the single most exciting film experiences I’ve ever had. I find it much more memorable and breathtaking than the now-catchphrased “I drink your milkshake!” line.
The lack of editing (by which I mean excessive cutting) in the film is breathtaking. Anderson lets the camera sit for minutes at a time, giving us a wide shot and simply letting the action unfold. It makes something as simple as Daniel picking his son up from a car in a field into a visually fascinating exercise in filmmaking. I can’t imagine that Michael Bay could have even sat through watching this film, but I absolutely love how Anderson slows everything down and just lets things happen. It’s amazing how, if you have a good script and good actors, you don’t need hyper-stylized editing to make a film more exciting.
Giving Daniel Day-Lewis the Oscar for best Actor somehow doesn’t seem like enough; it’s as if he somehow transcended acting to become Daniel Plainview. To be honest, words alone cannot do justice to what he does in this film. I’ve never been a particularly big fan of Day-Lewis’, mostly because he picks some really odd movies to star in and he always seems to take himself too seriously, but I can’t even entirely wrap my brain around what he did in this film yet. Even if you have no interest in a period piece about oil whatsoever, you absolutely have to see this performance; it will go down in history, mark my words.
With such a strong lead role, it would have been easy for Day-Lewis’ antagonist in the film to have been overpowered, but he’s matched by an equally memorable Paul Dano as Reverend Eli Sunday. The young, scraggly man shouldn’t have had a chance against Day-Lewis in the film, but he brings an eerie passion and fanaticism to the role that is surprisingly effective. I think praise for Dano has been lost amidst all the accolades for Day-Lewis, but his performance is nothing short of amazing.
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out Johnny Greenwood’s remarkable minimalist score. Yes, that’s the same Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead fame, wrongly robbed of an Oscar nomination because apparently some of the music in the film had been used in some form or another previously. With the exception of one sequence that sounds as if it were lifted directly out of Michael Giacchino’s music on Lost, Greenwood’s score is fascinating, almost becoming a character in and of itself. It would have been easy to rely on a lush orchestral score to accompany this film, but Anderson knew that something more unique would really cement the film’s identity.
There Will Be Blood comes to DVD as both single-disc (why bother?) and double-disc editions. Unfortunately, the two-disc features very little in the way of actual making-of material, but I suspect that’s more by Anderson’s design than anything else. Here’s what comes on the 2-Disc Collector’s Edition:
* 15 Minutes: Pics, Research, Etc. for the Making of There Will Be Blood – Pretty much exactly what it sounds like, this collection of archival materials that informed the film’s production design is compared to moments in the film and runs, unsurprisingly, for about 15 minutes.
* Trailers – Two trailers for the film.
* "Fishing" Sequence (6 minutes) – A deleted scene.
* Haircut / Interrupted Hymn (3 minutes) – Another deleted scene.
* Dailies Gone Wild (2 minutes) – A lengthy outtake, basically.
* The Story Of Petroleum (ca. 1923) – A 26-minute vintage black & white silent film chronicling the oil business in the 1920s, featuring a new score by Greenwood.
There Will Be Blood’s slightly unsatisfying detour of an ending might keep the film from becoming one of my absolute favorite movies ever. Instead, it may have to settle in as simply one of my absolute favorite movies of 2007, but it’s certainly a movie I hold in extremely high regard. In a rare case where an actor’s performance goes beyond a film, Daniel Day-Lewis’ role as Daniel Plainview will without a doubt go down as one of the single most incredible movie performances of all time.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
Overall Picture:
Movie: A+
DVD: B
- Mike Spring
Editor
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