“I fully anticipate this will be a film that will be hard for many people to choke down,” Ain’t It Cool’s “Moriarty”/Drew McWeeny has written about There Will be Blood. “Daniel Plainview, the character played by Daniel Day-Lewis, is one of the most flawed and disturbing ‘heroes’ in film history.
“But it’s obvious that Paul Thomas Anderson fell in love with the character as he was writing him, flaws and all, and decided to follow him to whatever end occurred, not worrying about making it safe or whether or not we’ll ‘like’ Plainview.
There Will be Blood “is unapologetic. It is clear-eyed in its purpose. In a way, it shocks me how direct the storytelling is. This is not a film like El Topo where you’re going to argue about what’s going on or what it means. PTA’s last two films, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, were left turns into a sort of oblique artsy playfulness that was maddening to some viewers, and I got the feeling he was sort of going in circles waiting for his best work to arrive. Hard Eight and Boogie Nights were both so authentic, so packed with energy and enthusiasm for storytelling, that I felt like all we needed to do was wait for him to find the right story to tell.
“Imagine if Martin Scorsese had realized at some point that no one was going to give two shits about Leonardo DiCaprio in Gangs of New York and decided instead to just make a three-hour Bill The Butcher movie. That’s There Will Be Blood.”