There Will Be Blood 01/08/08

Will there actually be blood? The answer may surprise you. There is actually very little. And that scarceness of blood is magnified by the length of the movie (Three hours long.) This is unforgivable and though there were good moments in this film I cannot ignore the stretches when I was nervous and bored. Stretches where I found myself questioning writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson and what the hell he was doing.
The huge problem this film has is that it claims to be an epic. It isn't. The story isn't big enough. It's perfect for a normal sized movie about two hours long. But it is way two shallow for three hours. There is not enough happening. I swear, I could cut a half hour to forty minutes of this movie just in dramatic pauses and not lose a thing. This is how a usual scene would go: ten seconds of someone walking into the shot, they would speak a few lines, dramatic pause, someone else would say something, then they would stand around for awhile more. This movie is host to the most boring character I've seen all year. It's a man who claims to be the half-brother of the oil man Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis). There is nothing interesting about the guy and every line he speaks is said in this tired slow-motion. And in the background to all of this is the weirdest musical score I've ever heard in a western (It's quite ingenious actually and I really liked it.) It's frenzied, dramatic, and active. But It's completely out of place. They get the viewer all riled up and excited for a bunch of long slow shots of nothing. And I don't care if Westerns are supposed to be boring and slow. They don't have to be, and I would expect P.T. Anderson, one of our most exciting directors, to realize that. His second movie "Boogie Nights" fitted ten times as much story in the same amount of time. This movie, with a thirty minute trim, would be vastly superior than what it currently is.
The story this movie has, though shallow for its time length, is very good though. It has several great scenes and contains some memorable characters. The best and most original is Paul Dano's evangelical preacher Eli Sunday. Every scene with him is great. So much so that when he is not on the screen the movie suffers. I wish there were more of him. He is the only character in the story that can stand up to the very big character of Daniel Plainview. It is great to see the two together. One representing corporate greed, the other representing religious fanaticism. There is a competition amongst them, which by the end plays itself out in ways you wouldn't imagine. One would only hope that the story would be more about these two and not get sidetracked so much with subplots that take forever to resolve. Who could watch the baptism scene and not concede that this relationship is what the entire movie should have been about.