There Will be Bood (**)

So what the hell am I to think of There Will be Blood, I ask? Am I to praise it for its craftsmanship, its operatic nature, its captivating performances by hard-working and incomparably talented actors, or am I to slam it for its fundamental flaws? It's a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, which means that it's likely to be dealing with despicable people. That much I figured on going in. What I didn't figure on was the presentation of despicable people as though their despicable nature made them worthwhile viewing.

I suppose I should have. I had the same complaint about Magnolia, which others seem to have enjoyed much more than I did - Roger Ebert, the critic I most respect, recently added it to his "Great Movies" collection. Did I miss the boat? Is there value in this sort of film, which also presents despicable people doing despicable things on lavish sets upon which actors portrayed their characters' despicable acts with considerable verve? Perhaps it asks us to empathize with these characters, or find the humanity inherent in their flaws. The problem wasn't that the characters were flawed, though. It's that they were fundamentally defective. "If I saw that in a movie," Magnolia's narrator described our argument to the coincidences in that movie, "I wouldn't believe it." My response was to think "If I saw any of these characters in a movie that purported to have a villain, I'd say they were empty antagonists, cartoonish to a fault. Why on earth would anyone want to focus a movie around a dozen of them?"

So too is my complaint with There Will be Blood, which shares many of the same tonal characteristics. There are differences in presentation, sure, but the movie struck me in remarkably the same way. Where Magnolia is a mosaic, There Will be Blood is a character study; where Magnolia presented directionless characters whose lives fell into chaos, There Will be Blood presents a man essentially defined by his ambition and drive but with no moral compass whatsoever; where Magnolia presented its religion in mostly hidden symbols before its gob-smackingly off-the-wall finale, There Will be Blood presents it as an institution of people at odds with our supposed protagonist.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In the movie I'm supposed to be reviewing here, Daniel-Day Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, and Daniel Plainview is a thorough, unrepentant son of a bitch. We first meet him digging for silver in a Texas hole. He finds some, but cruelly breaks his leg, drags himself out of the hole and miles away, we gather. This is disconnected from the rest of the film both in plot and character; I get the feeling I know what p.t.a. was trying to set up here, but it just doesn't fucking work. Start at the character's personal low point, show what drives him, blah blah blah. When we next meet him he's prospecting for oil, or more properly, attempting to persuade people to sell or lease him land upon which to set up wells.

A teenage boy finds him and tells him he believes there is oil on his father's land, near his tiny Texas town. This tip is given to him by Paul Sunday (played by Paul Dano). Paul's brother Eli becomes a figure in their local church. The church is of the crazier persuasion. Speaking in tongues. Sarah Palin shit. I should also mention that Eli is also played by Paul Dano, and let me tell you here and now that that was pretty fucking confusing for a time.

Most of the movie consists of Plainview drilling on the Texas land and trying to keep the religious wackos off his back. If that doesn't sound very interesting, it's not. He has a habit of making false promises, such as donating $5,000 to building a new church, or allowing Eli to bless the well before they start drilling. When a man is killed in the drilling, Eli says "This could have been prevented." Right. By the blessing. We know we're not supposed to like the church people, because Eli's youngest sister says to Daniel's son H.W. (to us) early that if her father beats her if she doesn't pray. And of course we can't like Plainview, whose son he uses as a prop and who, after going deaf in an accident, he finds not useful to him anymore and sends away.

Plainview bought up most of the property around this town, but there was a holdout. No matter, Plainview explains in his most condescending tone (which is saying something): seepage has insured that the oil that was under his land is in his possession anyway. But Plainview needs to build a pipeline, and needs to go through the holdout's land. The holdout tells him it's no problem, so long as he converts. Ah, Christians.

Plainview agrees. I am told by the dick-sucking sycophant that wrote the IMDB synopsis that the conversion is "hilariously false." Hilariously? People of that persuasion - which the effetes that write plot summaries for IMDB may not be aware actually exist in enormous numbers in places where they don't live, but who offer the best scientific explanation for the election and re-election of George W. Bush - will be sickened by the falseness of the conversion, while people not of the persuasion should be sickened by the conversion itself. To what purpose is the scene in the movie? To show that Plainview will stoop to any charade in order to make his money. You know, the same point that the movie has been banging us over the fucking head with for the last two and a half fucking hours.

The last scene of There Will be Blood is memorable, at least. I'll give it that much. Far be it for me to decry any scene where a man is beaten to death with a vintage bowling pin.

I dunno. My problem, as I think about it, becomes less specific to There Will be Blood and more general to its creator. I have nothing against Paul Thomas Anderson personally, but I guess I'm just more of the Kevin Smith school (Kevin Smith once famously ranted against Magnolia on his message board: "They sent me an Academy screener DVD this week. I'll never watch it again, but I will keep it. I'll keep it right on my desk, as a constant reminder that a bloated sense of self-importance is the most unattractive quality in a person or their work." - so take that for what it is). Anderson knows how to make a nice-looking movie, he's good with steadicams, he inspires good performances, and at time he seems almost channeling Scorcese or Kubrick, but I've never been given evidence that he knows what a movie should be. He reminds me of the great George Carlin's description of white people playing the blues. "It ain't enough to know which notes to play, you gotta know why they need to be played." He doesn't.

There Will be Blood has been described by some fellators as comparable to Citizen Kane. I've seen Citizen Kane. It's not. I understand that Anderson dropped out of NYU's film school, presumably because he felt there was nothing they could teach him. Maybe he should have stayed long enough to get to the point where they write in bold all-caps letters across the chalkboard, "WHY THE FUCK SHOULD I CARE?"

Rating: 2 stars (out of 4).

Currently plowing through Deadwood: Season 1 at an alarming rate.