There Will Be A Review

I know "No Country For Old Men" swept the key awards this weekend, an augur of Oscar success, but "There Will Be Blood" is a better film, a masterpiece, a showcase for an almost otherworldly acting performance, a film with the best score I have heard in my lifetime, and the telling of a story that is timeless.

Daniel Day-Lewis appears in virtually every frame of its two and a half hours, and his Daniel Plainview is a man with demons, with inadequacies, with shortcomings, with the inability to connect or even tolerate other human beings, to the extent that he uses his most cherished fellow human being, his adopted son H.W., as a prop, a way to ingratiate himself to communities out of whom he wants to swindle their natural resources. He eventually comes to resent his son, for an event that makes him rich. An oil well gushes and blows out H.W.'s eardrum, an oil well that will reap untold fortunes for Daniel. Not being able to relate to his son, to communicate with him, he rejects him, sends him away, breeds anger and a final rift. Here's that key moment, as recounted by Premiere's Glenn Kenny:

H.W. has been the only person Plainview has ever really confided in. Now he can’t communicate with him. Plainview’s exchange with his right hand man Fletcher Hamilton (Cieran Hinds) is telling in a number of ways. “Is H.W. okay?” Fletcher asks. “No, he’s not okay,” Plainview says. Soon, he looks again at Fletcher. “What are you so miserable about? We’ve got an ocean of oil under our feet…and only I can get at it!” Note the use of the first person singular here. Of course it suggests Plainview’s selfishness, callousness…but it also suggests a sundered partnership. Had H.W. been standing with Plainview and Fletcher, uninjured and whole, Plainview would have been speaking to H.W., and he would have said “we.”

The movie is less about the oil business and its historical underpinnings, and the wildcatters and businessmen who built it, than about one man and his family, including the surrogate family of the Sundays, particularly the brothers Eli and Paul, played by Paul Dano. Paul only shows up in the first moments, to tip Plainview off to a fertile tract of land in the Little Boston area. Eli is the preacher who becomes Plainview's nemesis from thereafter. There's a lot of talk about the ending of the film, which some have found discordant. I found it perfectly relevant. Eli becomes the son that Plainview can lash out at, unlike H.W., who is closer to his flesh and blood. In a movie full of real family and fake family, only by the end and only to Eli can all of the emotions of humiliation and self-loathing and anger be displaced. Daniel Plainview, by the end, an alcoholic, insular, closed figure, eventually devours himself.

The Glenn Kenny review is more of a spoiler, by the way.