2007 Alternate Oscars

I wrote this review of There Will Be Blood (along with reviews of Inglourious Basterds and The Grand Budapest Hotel, here) five days after the August 2017 white supremacist / terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Spoilers.

I had actively avoided There Will Be Blood for a decade — perhaps because the famous line "I drink your milkshake!" led me to believe it was a comedy about dairy products.

It is, in point of fact, a tragedy featuring petroleum byproducts. Based on Sinclair Lewis's novel Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson gives us the story of Daniel Plainview (the great Daniel Day-Lewis winning his second of three Oscars), a would-be oilman who gets everything he ever wanted and loses himself in the process.

But this isn't a morality play about greed, it's a cautionary tale about that most American of virtues and vices, rugged individualism. Plainview's dream isn't to pile up money — he turns down an easy million, for example, opting instead for the hard, risky work of building a pipeline to the sea. No, what Plainview longs for is to cut the middleman out of his business affairs. And not just the railroads and the big oil producers who take a large cut of the profits, but all middlemen everywhere: friends, family, God, and finally dignity and sanity — anyone or anything upon which he might have to rely.

By the end he's living like a feral cat in a giant mansion, free at last.

Many reviews concluded that Plainview is a monster and maybe he is, but there's a certain majesty in his labors. At least he's making something of tangible value as opposed to the worthless paper products Wall Street's fraudsters and slicky-boys fobbed off on a gullible public.

But crazy Plainview most definitely is, the end for all of us who think we can live without regard for our fellow human beings.

Is There Will Be Blood a great film? Yes, absolutely. Unless it's terrible. The movie is two and a half hours long, is virtually silent for long stretches as it contemplates the West like no one since John Ford, and when people do finally speak, they say nothing of value, which is fine because no one is listening anyway. Like Dunkirk which I reviewed here, the characters in There Will Be Blood reveal themselves strictly by their actions.

Do they reveal enough? That is the question. I'd have to see the movie again to decide for sure whether there's as much moving under its surface as I think there is.

Check back here in 2027 for my final verdict.

My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.