There Will Be Blood; or Why The Hell Did White Europeans Settle In The Desert In The First Place?

There Will Be Blood is not here for you, and it does not need your fucking pity. It does exactly what it wants when it wants to. And it is probably the best film I have seen in the last couple of years. It is hardly a film for the faint of heart, but we never wanted those guys in here with us anyway.
From the beautifully brief and threadbare intro sequence to the jarring and booming soundtrack, it is rare in managing to be a both artistic and apparently successful.

It is, in a sense, the anti-Lost. Lost is convoluted, and uses its shallow one-note characterisation and cheap cliffhanger endings to keep the audience hooked as well as confused. Blood does exactly the opposite. It keeps the focus narrow and dense, and instead leaps about within scenes to keep you on your toes. The editing is first rate, and introduces the dislocating scene changes, slow pans and unsteady rhythm that I usually associate with more esoteric offerings. In fact the early part reminded me aesthetically of the weirder moments in The Wicker Man. The dialogue is kept minimal and to the point. There is no dialogue for the first 20 minutes. yet when the speaking starts, it is so well measured that you don't notice the acting. Oh, the acting.

The fact is ththat there are no particularly great performances. Sure Daniel Day-Lewis is convincing and mad as a big bag of crazy, but as usual he still speaks in a maddeningly untraceable accent and still insists on chomping away on nothing, rather like an old man eating a cheesestring. The preacher-child (for it is he.) looks every inch the giggling buffoon serviceable but hardly stunning. The lines are delivered in a perfectly workable way, but it is not the acting or actors that you are looking at. It seems to be a film almost completely without subtle body language, usually the sign of first rate acting performances. If Plainview is angry, or plotting, he has to show it very obviously on his face. :-(
To put it simply, none of this matters. Themes include everything (I dont mean literally everything but its damn close) except notably love and death issues, both being as common as muck in modern media, and as such having no place in this film.

There are some downpoints though. It does severely lull at certain bits, although this may simply be exhaustion resulting from the density of the preceding scenes. As I mentioned, the acting isn't great, despite what you may have heard, but the script more than shines through.

An obvious comparison is Citizen Kane, and this is not unfair. The story of a tycoon, the lust for power and wealth (or something like it) is all too familiar. But there are no morals at the end of Blood, only lessons on consequences. This sets it apart from Citizen Kane, which is couched (though very loosely) in 30's moralising about comeuppances. This is present in Blood, but far more visceral, immediate and equitable. The differences between Kane and Blood are of distance. Despite the closer urban conditions of Citizen Kane, the viewer is often far removed from the protagonist. In Blood, you are so close to the protagonist it's hard to breathe.