After the first 25 minutes of There Will Be Blood I was ready to tear up my best of 07 list and slot it right at the top. After an hour that still seemed like a great idea. Another hour and forty minutes later it was at the top of another list right ahead of No Country For Old Men: Most Incredible Disappointments.
There will be blood is gorgeous. The writing is spare, but original and deeply compelling. But the story, such as it is, seems to have a split personality, and it spends a great deal of time headed one way and then decides to sum up another. Is it a man struggling to find love and discovering that the only pleasure he’s capable of feeling is the joy that comes with crushing others? Or is it a battle between two egomanical misanthropes who ultimately discover that they have only one another? Either movie might have been fascinating. Sadly TWBB is neither and both at the same time. The ultimate scene feels unearned, the ending to a movie you didn’t watch, and the hollowness that results comes from feeling like you were cheated out of the last half of what began as a brilliant film.
The other thing worth noting is the Johnny Greenwood score. As a big Radiohead fan I admit to paying more attention to it than I might with most other scores, but that’s partly because it goes out of its way to call attention to itself. Full of eerie detuned harmonies and sparse thumping percussion, it sometimes feels like it’s just laying on top of the picture as opposed to invisibly helping it along. Like the movie in total, I was predisposed to love it and it’s an unfortunate comment on how distracting it was that I ended up feeling like it didn’t work.
Finally, Daniel Day Lewis will likely get and probably deserves a nomination. It’s only the careful planting of his unhinged glares and barely controlled temper along the way that makes the final confrontation feel like anything other than scenery chewing. At that point the originality of the character he’s created starts to fade as shades of his Gangs of New York performance creep in, but Jack Nicholson has made a career of playing the same guy over and over and we still nominate him. If the movie as a whole had come together better I’d probably be driving the bus for his campaign. As it stands I’ll be satisfied just to avoid him in any bowling alleys.
