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English-Language Movies in Madrid: There Will be Blood

English-Language Movies in Madrid: There Will be Blood

There Will Be Blood has been called "as close to perfection as you will find in a movie." That's some pretty heavy hype to go up against...

There Will be Blood

There Will Be Blood has been called "as close to perfection as you will find in a movie." That's some pretty heavy hype to go up against, especially when I'm already practically in love with the leading man, Daniel Day-Lewis. So I armed myself with a good dose of skepticism, buckled down and saw the film. My conclusion? Well, I can't quite decide if it's genius.

Our protagonist is the eminently unpleasant Daniel Plainview. An ambitious oilman who goes to the town of Little Boston (what a misnomer) seeking oil. When he and his adopted son find it, he starts greedily buying up all the land in the area for a pittance.

As Plainview, Daniel Day-Lewis is, admittedly, an intense and enthralling snake-oil salesman and this is practically a one-man show - he's rarely off screen. He's got a somewhat startling accent and that great steely gaze, but sometimes he seems too twisted in his squinty-eyed grimace. It's not hammy, as some have said, but even in supposedly unguarded moments he speaks with the same, stiff, leathery countenance. Day-Lewis might have toned it down juuuust a bit at times.

The only other character with significant screen time is Plainview's local rival, Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano (who also plays that character's brother, Paul, in an annoyingly confusing moment at the beginning, which detracts momentarily from the flow of the picture.)

Eli is a young proselytizing preacher in a spare church in a dry, barren land where people need all the solace they can get. And, let's face it, in this vast wasteland, churchgoing's the only pastime.

Dano seems too intent on being the soft spoken, morally intense, spiritual leader type. His shtick doesn't quite convince. But perhaps that’s the point. To cast a shade of doubt on his character, perhaps it's not bad acting. However, we're meant to see Eli as Plainview does: a fake who is, Plainview's religious equivalent.. This of course means that Plainview hates him instantly.

The rest of the movie progresses along the unsurprising trajectory of acquisition, blind ambition, greed, the erosion of family bonds, etc... Until Plainview ends up in a very Citizen Kane-esque mansion, nutty as a fruitcake and totally alone.

There's nothing cathartic about this movie, it lacks the "pity and fear" elements of classical tragedy, and it may leave you empty, but I can't say that that makes it a bad film. It’s absolutely mesmerizing. It refuses to let you relax. I felt like I was seeing something I hadn't seen before in a movie. It's as though I was encountering something new and a bit off - like when you first encounter a new type of music and you like it but you can't quite catch the rhythm.

Here the rhythm is uncomfortable. It's comparable to a bulldozer, but more precise. Ah, yes, it’s like the very drills that Plainview uses to gut the landscape; the story moves with merciless, drilling and boring - a blind penetration and progress towards, well, who knows. (Ok, we know it's not gonna be sunshine, lollipops and bunnies; it's gonna be something bad, probably something bloody.) This rhythm is helped along significantly by Johnny Greenwood's score, a relentless humming, percussive, almost mechanical whine that from the very first scene doesn't let the feeling of foreboding leave you.

And as for the story itself? Well, it's not a muckraking piece about oil-barons, like the Upton Sinclair novel on which it is based. But it does bring to light a side of Western history often ignored in favor of the more romantic cowboy and Indian tales. The west is shown as a rugged and brutal landscape full of individualistic and often brutal types. But we are reminded that it was also a place where established financial interests came and took over as they saw fit: digging, drilling, pumping, blasting, and damming the vast landscape into submission for financial gain.

That's the background of this tale, but not its purpose, or its message, which is...um, I don't know, perhaps that should've been its message because Plainview as a focus is a bit insufficient. It's a personal tale without enough person. We see his humanity in his interaction with his adopted son, H.W., but he is cruel and he is cold, and we can't understand him; the movie gives us no way to, and so we're given no reason to care about him. That said, he's still fascinating to watch, mesmerizing like the film as a whole. I can't quite explain it, and my whole purpose is explanation.

Bottom line: this is a beautiful piece of art, evocative, fixating, and as most good art does, it leaves you feeling a bit uncomfortable.