THE EMPEROR’S NEW $12, 158-MINUTE MASTERPIECE

THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson)
PLOT: Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a sociopathic oilman. Paul Dano plays his nemesis, greedy revivalist preacher Eli Sunday. Plainview adopts the son of a fellow oilman killed in an accident and raises him on his own. The child, H.W. Plainview, is deafened in another accident and is sent away to a school for the deaf. After killing a con man posing as his brother, Plainview is blackmailed into being baptized into Sunday’s congregation and into retrieving the deaf child. After great financial success, Plainview drives away H.W. after revealing his true parentage and then drunkenly kills Sunday.

Newspaper advertisements assured me that There Will Be Blood is a “masterpiece,” “enthralling,” “wholly original” and “powerfully eccentric”. So I was prepared to hate it. I didn’t! Hating the movie itself is unrewarding. As an inanimate object it can offer no satisfaction. But Paul Thomas Anderson – him I can hate for stealing 158 minutes of my earthly existence and $12 of my hard earned money. It’s possible that the goddess of circumstance will give me the opportunity of retrieving my $12 (167% of New York state minimum wage) from Mr. Anderson. New Year’s resolution #2: brush up on my pickpocketing. But those 158 minutes…

$12 for 158 minutes of looking at Daniel Day-Lewis’ handsome visage isn’t to be sneered at. Day-Lewis makes far too few movies and as it appears that he’s turning into Jane Fonda circa 1975 - he only makes socially significant, “important” films - I’ll have to take what I can get. But 158 minutes is forty minutes longer than Citizen Kane, a movie on the same theme, the corruptive power of money and greed on a emotionally stunted man, and generally accepted as a masterpiece. Forty more masterpiece minutes than Kane – what are they? Extraneous but technically fluent shots of scrubland, irrelevant plot developments, cornball devices, poorly edited action sequences, and wasted acting.

The movie opens with a dialogue-free sequence showing Plainview digging for gold and breaking his leg in the process: frightening but pointless. Anderson then takes twenty minutes to show us Plainview exploring for oil, his partner's death and Plainview's somewhat casual adoption of this partner's child’s. Five well-edited minutes would suffice. Another sequence shows Plainview buttering up landowners for access to their oil-rich property, and like many of Blood’s dialogue sequences it’s played at half-speed, every word enunciated with a cloud of pauses floating around it. The mid-movie reunion between Plainview and his adopted son is shot from a distance, which allows for a nifty tracking sequence but not for the viewer’s involvement. The confrontations between Plainview and Sunday (Paul Dano) are irrational,and Dano is so irritatingly shrieky an actor that the he loses the audience’s affection and so any dramatic tension between the two men is muted to inaudibility.

I can’t think of a movie, apart from any number of Godard films, that so resolutely refuses to accumulate dramatic momentum. The two most engaging parts of the film, a nighttime oilwell explosion and Plainview's baptism, are both followed by sequences so flat that they cancel out the viewer’s enthusiasm. And Anderson’s corny attempts to let the audience “experience” the child’s deafness – the movie’s sound goes off, ooh! – pure cheese. I was kind of wishing the child had been blinded. Then Anderson would turn off all the lights and I could have taken a nap.

Ciaran Hinds, an incisive and distinctive actor, plays Plainview’s second-in-command, a part so sparsely written thatit's a waste of Hinds' considerable presence. The problem with casting an actor like Hinds and then underusing him is that the actor’s charisma leads the audience to expect something from him, and when nothing happens we feel cheated.

This charisma cheat is magnified with Day-Lewis. He’s got a some great moments – the baptism, his murder of the con man, the comic mayhem of the finale, – but mostly all he gets to do is lope around alone looking deranged. Blood reminds me of Mommie Dearest. The audience is supposed to love/hate Mommie, like we should love/hate Plainview – but they’re the most interesting people in their movies, more vibrant, more exciting, so we root for them instead. The balance of ambiguous allegiance, necessary for dramatic tension, is lopsided. So Mommie Dearest becomes campy, and Blood is inert.

I can’t blame Day-Lewis for taking the part. On paper it probably looked great, but once Anderson gets jiggy with the camera any dramatic opportunities are, like my 158 minutes, gone with the wind.