There Will Be Ham

I want to divert from the weighty and political for a moment, and instead aim my pretension at something lighter.

Finally caught up to There Will Be Blood last night, and I'm happy to find myself still chewing over its meaning today. Not chewing quite as hungrily as Daniel Day-Lewis chews scenery, but definitely savouring some of the thematic bits still stuck between my teeth.

In terms of execution, what I found most interesting was how relatively calm it was, compared to most of Paul Thomas Anderson's previous movies. After the giant ensemble casts, complex plotting and restless camerawork of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, he seemed, with Punch Drunk Love, to have shifted into more intimate territory, focusing on a few central characters and relying more on gorgeous compositions than trick photography. With There Will Be Blood, he manages to combine the epic feel of his earlier movies with the intimacy of Punch Drunk Love, and it's pretty impressive.

I'm a little conflicted about Day-Lewis' performance, though. He paints the character of Daniel Plainview using the broadest strokes imaginable, especially in the film's climactic scene, where his affected gate and bug-eyed rage veer into self-parody. Day-Lewis won the Oscar, but his task in There Will Be Blood didn't require him to thread the same fine needle as, say, George Clooney in Michael Clayton.

However, I give Anderson the benefit of the doubt for getting exactly what he wanted out of his lead actor, and Day-Lewis enough credit for not hamming it up for ham's sake. There's a purpose to it all, even in that ending that seems to puncture the fairly serious mood of the previous two hours. 

I'm guessing the idea is that Plainview has been driven utterly bonkers by his own hyper-competitive nature. The best scenes in the movie show how, once he is fabulously wealthy, he doesn't have an outlet for that part of him that relishes the act of crushing a competitor even more than counting the money that comes from doing it. So at the end, he crushes his rival just to feel the sensation of eliminating him.

There Will Be Blood might be Anderson's best yet, but like all of his films, its execution is just skewed enough - and its meaning just elusive enough - to keep it out of reach of the big awards.

Love that Jonny Greenwood horror-movie score, too.