This past Sunday (Feb. 24th), actor Daniel Day-Lewis won the Academy Award for Best Leading Actor in a Film for his performance as Daniel Plainview in the movie “There Will Be Blood.”  The film, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, has had a lot of attention since it’s release.  I have been meaning to see the movie for some time but did not get around to it until last night.  Having read multiple reviews and heard all the hype about the movie leading up to the Academy Awards I assumed that “There Will Be Blood” was going to be a pretty good movie.  Having now seen it I will  say that “There Will Be Blood” was a very good film in my opinion.  In fact I think it might be one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time.  I’m not even sure if the awesome and amazing Academy Award winning Best Picture of this year, “No Country For Old Men” is as good as “There Will Be Blood.”  That is a bold statement, this I realize, “No Country For Old Men” is undoubtedly a great piece of film but I get the feeling, personally, that “There Will Be Blood” is, in the long run, the better of the two.  So why did it not win Best Picture?  Good question, maybe it should have, but personally I think it makes sense that it didn’t.

I went to see “There Will Be Blood” with Bear and when the film was over the two of us left the theatre in relative silence.  Then we both had a kind of “huh?” moment as if neither of us were sure how we were suppose to react to the two and a half hours of movie we just finished watching.  I believe I said I needed to sleep on it, and now I have, and I am still in the state of “huh?”  The “huh?” is not because “There Will Be Blood” is bad by any means but more so because it is an enigma.  It is a piece of art that expresses something deep, profound, and all around rather disturbing about humanity; you can feel this as you watch.  Several times throughout the film I realized that I was sitting on the edge of my seat leaning towards the screen as if trying to hear something that was just a whisper in a given scene.  That is the thing about “There will Be Blood” the dialogue is so little and then when it does occur what is said is often so short and blunt, that you, as the audience, have to be looking for the greater detail in the images and sounds that occur outside of speaking to put together the whole image.  “There will Be Blood” isn’t vague, in fact I would call it almost blunt force.  Here is Daniel Plainview.  Here is Eli Sunday.  Here are ideological men; men with purpose, ambition, drive; men willing to kill or die for or do both in the pursuit of their personal goals.  I think the sheer blunt rigid presentation in this film more than anything is what makes it so hard to both understand and deal with.  I think that the ”huh?” that Bear and I experienced as we walked out at the end of the movie was a reaction similar to somebody who had just been unexpectedly slapped.  “There Will Be Blood” might seem like it is dragging a bit, or really slow to start, but it is building momentum the whole time.  From the very start with Plainview as a silver miner the gears of the whole story are in motion and picking up steam and leading to the climax. Then it happens, the moment that all others have been building to, and then cut to credits.  I don’t want to give away how the movie ends to those people who haven’t had the chance to see it  but what I will say is that the film’s title is so purposeful that you cannot really appreciate it without seeing the whole movie.

Besides the outstanding cinematography and amazing acting I think my favorite part of “There Will Be Blood” was the soundtrack and sound editing.  The music that is used is all at once powerful and gripping and disturbing.  It is, in itself a character, in the movie, that sets the mood with perfect precision.  To me the music was almost like the narrator that filled in where the character dialogue was so sparse.  It reminded me some of the sound that Kubrick used in both ”The Shining” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”  It was fantastic.

In closing, I found myself thinking about Charles Foster Kane, the media tycoon from Orson Welles’ classic “Citizen Kane”, last night before I went to bed.  The character of Daniel Plainview is something like Kane and yet I get the feeling he was even worse.  Kane could be a monster, a ruthless individual who had no fear of crushing his competition and those who stood in his way but then again he had the whole Rosebud thing, this longing and nostalgia as if he wished he had had a different life, one where he wasn’t the mighty media millionaire and considered a heartless fiend of a man.  I didn’t get the impression that Plainview in “There Will Be Blood” was like Kane in this one aspect.  Yes he was heartless and driven and probably insane but he didn’t have a redeeming Rosebud in him that makes us the audience in the very least want to believe he wasn’t a complete monster of a person.  Plainview personifies an evil of humanity that lacks a redeeming quality and it is chilling.  In many ways Plainview is actually much more like Anton Chigurh, the brutal killer from “No Country for Old Men” (actor Javier Bardem won the Acadamy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of this character) than he is like Charles Foster Kane.  I cannot help thinking of Kane becuase of some similarities but in the end I really think that it is Chigurh who Plainview is really like.  Utter purpose regardless of all else in the world, and that kind of person should not exist because it seems that it is in them that a true monster is formed.

~Nathaniel