There Will Be Blood

Last night, Greg and I saw There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Upton Sinclair's novel Oil, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays a somewhat similar role to that he played in Gangs of New York. I'm not usually a fan of period films from American history, but this one had gotten great reviews, and Daniel Day-Lewis is a pretty amazing actor, so I went anyway.

As you could expect, Day-Lewis' performance in this monstrous film over two and a half hours in length was nothing short of stellar, especially considering it was more or less a monologue. For this (his acting), I certainly think the film deserved some nominations. Also, the performance of the supporting role of the crazy preacher played by Paul Dano was quite fantastic. Finally, the music, oddly-enough composed by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood (their guitarist), was quite possibly the best soundtrack I've heard in a long time.

Other than this though, the film seemed a bit pointless, appearing to shift loosely from scene to scene, leaving me with very little to take home. This is most-likely due to the excessive length and dry narrative style (hell, even Greg managed to nod off during the beginning), but I would like to keep my judgments reserved a while longer for this one, especially considering how much all the critics seemed to like it. Maybe some sort of foreknowledge of Sinclair's novel would have helped, but right now I'm left a little bit in the dark as to why this film is supposedly so powerful. Sometimes I think we give too much credit to single performances when we should be looking at the film as a whole (or maybe that's just the composer in me talking...).