- Over an hour into P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood, I realized that I could actually be watching the best film of the decade. I wasn't, as it turns out, but the first half of the film certainly made it seem that way. This was a fire-and-brimstone epic filmed with the sort of transcendent profundity I normally associate with the likes of D.W. Griffith and Stanley Kubrick. Dealing with nothing less than the birth of one of the world's most important energy sources, it also featured a mesmerizing performance by Daniel Day-Lewis and locations and sets that looked as authentic as anything I could imagine. An hour-and-a-half later, I was watching a drunk old man tossing a bowling ball at a preacher and going on about milkshakes. Where did it all go wrong?
- Let's start, as Anderson does, at the beginning. There Will Be Blood's magnificent opening scenes are delivered like a missing chapter from 2001: A Space Odyssey with the discovery of oil substituting in for the leg bone that enabled one ape to clobber another. The being doing the clobbering in this case is an intrepid pioneer named Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis), whose booming drawl and imposing physique distinctly recall a young John Huston. Whereas Noah Cross only diverted water, however, Plainview prefers to move large amounts of oil. His initial forays into well-drilling go better for him than for his colleagues, one of whom dies in an accident, leaving an orphaned son named H.W. (Dillon Freasier). Given that Plainview's emotions appear to be centered exclusively upon the acquisition of oil, one suspects that Plainview adopts H.W. more as an advertising campaign than as a son.
- Some years later, Plainview's experiences have granted him an almost preternatural gift for sniffing out good places to drill. When a runaway named Paul (Paul Dano) describes how the oil at his family's California farm practically bubbles up to the surface, Plainview doesn't hesitate to drag H.W. out there quail hunting as an excuse to snoop around. There, they discover a land ripe for the picking, but for the interference of Paul's twin brother, Eli (Paul Dano). Whereas Paul just wanted to make a quick buck, Eli insists on using oil money to fund his local Pentecostal church. Predictably, the stubbornly practical Plainview and this rather manic preacher soon run afoul of one another, and the fact that young H.W. and Eli's sister (Sydney McCallister) seem destined to fall in love only complicates matters further.
- It was just after There Will Be Blood's best scene, a derrick explosion the likes of which hadn't graced the screen since The Wages of Fear, that I began to wonder whether this film really would be a bona fide cinematic masterpiece. Unfortunate, then, that the remainder of the film played like a fireworks show that fizzled onward for an hour after its climax. Some of the drama with Plainview's alleged brother Henry (Kevin J. O'Connor) is moderately interesting, while the scenes with a grown-up H.W. (Russell Harvard) feel distinctly unnecessary. The real problem, however, is that the aging oil man's behavior seems increasingly motivated by Anderson's affection for Citizen Kane than by any logical progression of character development. If Anderson could have maintained the exhaustive power of the film's first half (or, for that matter, Jonny Greenwood's amazing soundtrack), he could have made a film for the ages. Instead, the well plum dried up halfway through.
- Based in part on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!.
