Jeremy’s Tophunder №59: There Will Be Blood
I was a freshman in college in 2007. Making a concerted effort to adopt a more “adult” persona, I decided that I would be The Movie Guy on my floor. Back when Netflix was a DVDs-through-the-mail company, I would rent Academy Award-winning or -nominated movies, and invite people from the floor to come over and watch.
(Spoiler alert: They usually didn’t)
Anyway, in continuing my efforts to be The Movie Guy, when the Oscar nominations came out, I invited people on my floor to walk over to the Fenway movie theater and see movies nominated.
(Spoiler Alert: They usually didn’t)
I guess this is just a long way of saying that I went to see There Will Be Blood by myself when I was a freshman in college.
And you know what? I’m not apologizing for it. It’s a great movie, and the ending is so jarring and weird that it actually felt good to not have to talk about it with anyone. I think I just went home and went straight to sleep. The music from the credits stuck in my head for about a month.
Among the movies on my list, There Will Be Blood is among a small handful that I might consider the “best” movie, for technical and artistic reasons. Like, really, it’s a fucking masterpiece. Normally, when I want to share a scene or moment from a movie in this space, I’ll just link a YouTube clip in the text (like I did up there with the credits music). But there are some scenes and shots in There Will Be Blood that are just so spectacular that I need to embed them. You need to watch them. Here’s the scene when the oil derrick engulfs:
Holy shit. The camera movement. The dissonant music. The characters lit only by a roaring fire. Just an eight minute tour de force of filmmaking.
It says a lot about a movie when there’s no dialogue until about 15 minutes in. Here’s the first six minutes or so. Just imagine another eight or nine minutes like this before we even hear someone speak.
Look, I get it. It’s not a movie for everyone. It’s a touch pretentious (although what else do you expect out of a Paul Thomas Anderson movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis?), but it’s so technically brilliant that I can’t even be mad. You’re allowed to be pretentious if you make a movie that takes place in the desert of rural California and somehow make it visually breathtaking. Here’s a seven-minute breakdown of how Paul Thomas Anderson employs long shots with multiple framings and points of focus, along with minimal cuts to establish the tone and pace of the movie. Nothing here was an accident.
Daniel Day-Lewis is magnificent here, perhaps his best performance ever, and certainly on the short list for best performances in my Top 100 movies. He’s in almost literally every scene, and carries every scene he’s in. He dominates the movie with his face and his voice, and almost nothing else. He’s not a physically imposing character, but he’s intimidating and menacing either way. His sociopathy, cunning, and eventually madness drive the story. He takes no prisoners and offers no quarter. He eventually ends the movie as he started, alone, but relishes in his solitude.
There’s a story (possibly apocryphal) surrounding the making of the movie. It was tough for Paul Thomas Anderson and his production team to get financing, because the major studios didn’t think the story “had the scope of a major picture.” And they might have been right. The bare-bones plot of the movie isn’t -that- engaging. It’s about an oil driller that buys up some land and drills some oil and makes money while alienating people around him. It’s not that interesting in and of itself. What drives the movie is the character study of Daniel Plainview. And that’s ultimately what sold the movie. Studios weren’t interested until they learned that Daniel Day-Lewis was going to be playing the lead role. Then all of a sudden they were on board. They knew what Day-Lewis was capable of.
Paul Dano plays a perfect foil for Day-Lewis. Daniel Plainview, oil man, is blind with ambition and wants success for himself and nobody else. He’s eager and willing to take advantage of the residents of Little Boston, in order to buy their land cheaply and rake in the profits from the oil. He’s a grifter. So is Eli Sunday, the preacher at the church in Little Boston. He’s opportunistic, looking for any way that he can squeeze money out of the oil operation to “provide” for his church, but it’s clear by the end of the movie that he does nothing but squander any money he’s given, and he’s even willing to deny his faith and call himself a false prophet for even the chance at a few dollars. Both men prey financially upon those around them, but only one of them turned out successful. Plainview ends the movie alone and a raging alcoholic, but he’s rich. Sunday, well, isn’t.
The final scene of the movie is brilliant. I’m trying to write about these movies without overtly spoiling endings or important plot turns, so I won’t be too specific about it. Suffice it to say, an unhinged, deranged Daniel (just a few minutes of movie-time removed from firing rifles in the hallways of his empty mansion) and a broken, desperate Eli finally confront all of their differences. It’s beautifully shot and acted, and it’s well, bizarre and ridiculous and incredibly worth it.
It might seems strange that I’m writing about this movie in reverential tones, and yet in only ranks №59 on my list. I hope, if nothing else, it gives you some perspective on just how hard this list was to assemble. There Will Be Blood is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. If I hadn’t been working on this list for the last three years, and you asked me if There Will Be Blood is one of my, say, 20 favorite movies, I would have said absolutely. The problem there is that I probably would have had 75 movies in my Top 20. Some movies just need to get pushed down the list for reasons that even to me aren’t totally satisfying. It’s a difficult and tedious process. So while There Will Be Blood only barely sneaks into the Top 60, it’s still a movie I love more than I love some people I know.
(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)
Here’s our progress on the list so far:
6. The Fugitive
17. Ocean’s 11
24. Apollo 13
47. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
59. There Will Be Blood
67. Batman Begins
76. Finding Nemo
85. Seabiscuit
93. The Truman Show
