The NY Times: There Will Be Blood

This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.
There Will Be Blood -- François Duhamel/Paramount Vantage

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: December 26, 2007

“There Will Be Blood,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic American nightmare, arrives belching fire and brimstone and damnation to Hell. Set against the backdrop of the Southern California oil boom of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, it tells a story of greed and envy of biblical proportions — reverberating with Old Testament sound and fury and New Testament evangelicalism — which Mr. Anderson has mined from Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel “Oil!” There is no God but money in this oil-rich desert and his messenger is Daniel Plainview, a petroleum speculator played by a monstrous and shattering Daniel Day-Lewis.

Plainview is an American primitive. He’s more articulate and civilized than the crude, brutal title character in Frank Norris’s 1899 novel “McTeague,” and Erich von Stroheim’s masterly version of the same, “Greed.” But the two characters are brothers under the hide, coarse and animalistic, sentimental in matters of love and ruthless in matters of avarice. Mr. Anderson opens his story in 1898, closer to Norris’s novel than Sinclair’s, which begins in the years leading up to World War I. And the film’s opener is a stunner — spooky and strange, blanketed in shadows and nearly wordless. Inside a deep, dark hole, a man pickaxes the hard-packed soil like a bug gnawing through dirt. This is the earth mover, the ground shaker: Plainview.

Over the next two and a half mesmerizing hours Plainview will strike oil, then strike it rich and transform a bootstrapper’s dream into a terrifying prophecy about the coming American century. It’s a century he plunges into slicked in oil, dabbed with blood and accompanied by H. W. (eventually played by the newcomer Dillon Freasier), the child who enters his life in 1902 after he makes his first strike and seems to have burbled from the ground like the liquid itself. The brief scenes of Plainview’s first tender, awkward moments with H. W. will haunt the story. In one of the most quietly lovely images in a film of boisterous beauty, he gazes at the tiny, pale toddler, chucking him under the chin as they sit on a train very much alone.

“There Will Be Blood” involves a tangle of relationships, mainly intersecting sets of fathers and sons and pairs of brothers. (Like most of the finest American directors working now, Mr. Anderson makes little on-screen time for women.) But it is Plainview’s intense, needful bond with H. W. that raises the stakes and gives enormous emotional force to this expansively imagined period story with its pictorial and historical sweep, its raging fires, geysers of oil and inevitable blood. (Rarely has a film’s title seemed so ominous.) By the time H. W. is about 10, he has become a kind of partner to his father, at once a child and a sober little man with a jacket and neatly combed hair who dutifully stands by Plainview’s side as quiet as his conscience.

A large swath of the story takes place in 1911, by which point Plainview has become a successful oilman with his own fast-growing company. Flanked by the watchful H. W., he storms through California, sniffing out prospects and trying to persuade frenzied men and women to lease their land for drilling. (H. W. gives Plainview his human mask: “I’m a family man,” he proclaims to prospective leasers.) One day a gangling, unsmiling young man, Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), arrives with news that oil is seeping out of the ground at his family’s ranch. The stranger sells this information to Plainview, who promptly sets off with H. W. to a stretch of California desert where oil puddles the ground among the cactus, scrub and human misery.

Not long afterward oil is gushing out of that desert. The eruption rattles both the earth and the local population, whom Plainview soothes with promises. Poor, isolated, thirsting for water (they don’t have enough even to grow wheat), the dazed inhabitants gaze at the oilman like hungry baby birds. (Their barren town is oddly named Little Boston.) He promises schools, roads and water, delivering his sermon with a carefully enunciated, sepulchral voice that Mr. Day-Lewis seems to have largely borrowed from the director John Huston. Plainview is preaching a new gospel, though one soon challenged by another salesman, Paul Sunday’s Holy Roller brother, Eli (also Mr. Dano). A charismatic preacher looking to build a new church, Eli slithers into the story, one more snake in the desert.

Mr. Anderson has always worn his influences openly, cribbing from Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman among others (he helped the ailing Altman with his final film, “A Prairie Home Companion”), but rarely has his movie love been as organically integrated into his work as it is here. Movie history weighs on every filmmaker, informs every cut, camera angle and movement. “There Will Be Blood” is very much a personal endeavor for Mr. Anderson; it feels like an act of possession. Yet it is also directly engaged with our cinematically constructed history, specifically with films — “Greed” and “Chinatown,” but also “Citizen Kane” — that have dismantled the mythologies of American success and, in doing so, replaced one utopian ideal for another, namely that of the movies themselves.

This is Mr. Anderson’s fifth feature and it proves a breakthrough for him as a filmmaker. Although there are more differences than similarities between it and the Sinclair book, the novel has provided him with something he has lacked in the past, a great theme. It may also help explain the new film’s narrative coherence. His first feature, “Sydney” (also known as “Hard Eight”), showed Mr. Anderson to be an intuitively gifted filmmaker, someone who was born to make images with a camera. His subsequent features — “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia” and “Punch-Drunk Love” — have ambition and flair, though to increasingly diminished ends. Elliptical, self-conscious, at times multithreaded, they contain passages of clarity and brilliance. But in their escalating stylization you feel the burdens of virtuosity, originality, independence.

“There Will Be Blood” exhibits much the same qualities as Mr. Anderson’s previous work — every shot seems exactly right — but its narrative form is more classical and less weighted down by the pressures of self-aware auteurism. It flows smoothly, linearly, building momentum and unbearable tension. Mr. Day-Lewis’s outsize performance, with its footnote references to Huston and strange, contorted Kabuki-like grimaces, occasionally breaks the skin of the film’s surface like a dangerous undertow. The actor seems to have invaded Plainview’s every atom, filling an otherwise empty vessel with so much rage and purpose you wait for him to blow. It’s a thrilling performance, among the greatest I’ve seen, purposefully alienating and brilliantly located at the juncture between cinematic realism and theatrical spectacle.

This tension between realism and spectacle runs like a fissure through the film and invests it with tremendous unease. You are constantly being pulled away from and toward the charismatic Plainview, whose pursuit of oil reads like a chapter from this nation’s grand narrative of discovery and conquest. His 1911 strike puts the contradictions of this story into graphic, visual terms. Mr. Anderson initially thrusts you close to the awesome power of the geyser, which soon bursts into flames, then pulls back for a longer view, his sensuously fluid camera keeping pace with Plainview and his men as they race about trying to contain what they’ve unleashed. But the monster has been uncorked. The black billowing smoke pours into the sky, and there it will stay.

With a story of and for our times, “There Will Be Blood” can certainly be viewed through the smeary window that looks onto the larger world. It’s timeless and topical, general and specific, abstract and as plain as the name of its fiery oilman. It’s an origin story of sorts. The opening images of desert hills and a droning electronic chord allude to the beginning of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” whose murderous apes are part of a Darwinian continuum with Daniel Plainview. But the film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself.

“There Will Be Blood” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). As the title warns, there will be blood.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

Opens in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday.

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson; written by Mr. Anderson, based on the novel “Oil!” by Upton Sinclair; director of photography, Robert Elswit; edited by Dylan Tichenor; music by Jonny Greenwood; production designer, Jack Fisk; produced by Mr. Anderson, JoAnne Sellar and Daniel Lupi; released by Paramount Vantage and Miramax Films. Running time: 2 hours 38 minutes.

WITH: Daniel Day-Lewis (Daniel Plainview), Paul Dano (Paul Sunday/Eli Sunday), Kevin J. O’Connor (Henry), Ciaran Hinds (Fletcher) and Dillon Freasier (H. W.).

Times review - P.S.I Love You

The New York Times: P.P.S. Take Tissues to This Weepy About a Romance Tested by Death

...Harry Connick Jr. swings in and out as a possible love interest, as does the temperature-raiser Jeffrey Dean Morgan, a television actor (“Grey’s Anatomy,” “Weeds”) who bears a striking physical resemblance to Javier Bardem. Mr. Morgan’s appearance in “P. S. I Love You” finishes off Mr. Butler (last seen slaughtering Persians in “300”) far more effectively than does Gerry’s terminal illness.

AFI's Best of 2007

Variety:

“Knocked Up,” “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” and “The Savages” each got a hug from the American Film Institute, which on Sunday announced its top 10 film and TV lists for 2007.

Also making the feature list were “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” “Juno,” “Into the Wild,” “Michael Clayton,” “No Country for Old Men,” “Ratatouille” and “There Will Be Blood.”

On the TV side, “Dexter,” “Everybody Hates Chris,” “Friday Night Lights,” “Longford,” “Mad Men,” “Pushing Daisies,” “The Sopranos,” “Tell Me You Love Me,” “30 Rock” and “Ugly Betty” were cited.

The AFI Awards are voted on by two 13-member jury panels (one for film, one for TV), mixing scholars, critics and AFI trustees.

The org’s annual luncheon honoring the chosen titles will take place on Jan. 11 at the Four Seasons.

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Variety has the information

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Fasten your seat belts

Joseph Mankiewicz, master of all styles, is Hollywood's forgotten auteur.

The re-release of All About Eve shows his talent for crackling, epigrammatic dialogue, writes Kevin Jackson

Guardian

Why is Joseph Mankiewicz not a lot more famous? Or, at any rate, more notorious? He was, after all, the writer/director who (unjustly) took the rap for one of the most expensive and embarrassing flops in Hollywood's history: Cleopatra (1963), a two-year ordeal of bad luck and worse judgments that lit the well-publicised fires of love between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, but more or less destroyed Mankiewicz's career and came close to ruining his health. Cleopatra was an unexpected and humiliating crash-landing for a man who may not have been consistently dazzling, but was always a perfectionist, a highly skilled craftsman and, as even his enemies would admit, an utterly reliable professional. In later life, he enjoyed calling himself "the oldest whore on the beat". Well, enjoyed saying it as long as there was someone around to insist that it really wasn't so.

His 20 films as director or writer- director covered just about every major movie genre, from gothic to western, and at least a handful of them have been thoroughly enjoyed by millions and millions of people who might never have bothered to take note of his director's credit: Guys and Dolls (1955), for example, an agreeable musical if not a truly classic one, which showed the world that the brooding and introverted Brando could hoof and gag with the best of them; or Julius Caesar (1953), Mankiewicz's other collaboration with Brando, a thoughtful and respectful version of Shakespeare that showed the world that Young Mr Mumble could speak blank verse with a fair degree of eloquence. The Quiet American (1958), rather freely adapted from Graham Greene's mordant novel about Vietnam, was chosen by Jean-Luc Godard, then still a critic, as his film of the year. Godard was moved to call Mankiewicz "the most intelligent man in current cinema".

Then there was the blithe supernatural romance The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947), a well-loved hit in its own right, and, later, the basis for a popular television series of the same name; Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), from the play by Tennessee Williams - who hated the screen version; The Barefoot Contessa (1954), cited by Fellini as a major inspiration for La Dolce Vita; his swansong, Sleuth (1972), a box-office hit which brought Oscar nominations for its two-man cast, Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine; and - the film often considered his masterpiece, or at any rate his most personal and accomplished production - All About Eve (1950).

This is already quite an imposing CV, and it does not include Mankiewicz's distinguished work as a producer on, for example, The Philadelphia Story (1940). Nor does it acknowledge one of the most admirable aspects of his life and career: he was appalled by all forms of racism, and in No Way Out (1950) became one of the first American directors to put the issue at the heart of a tense drama.

Impressive as his shape-shifting talents are, it may well be that Mankiewicz's protean ability to work with any type of material is precisely the quality that has excluded him from the pantheon of Great American Directors. To put it in marketing terms, he failed to establish a recognisable brand identity. In film-speak, he has never quite cut it as an auteur. Compare some other indisputably big guns of his day (a long day, as his career spanned several decades - the rise and fall of the studio system) and the genres with which they are all but synonymous. Hitchcock? Thrillers and weird psychology. Cukor? The so-called "woman's picture". Ford? Westerns. Preston Sturges? Screwball comedy. Minnelli? Musicals. De Mille? Epics. Wilder? Acerbic satire. Chaplin and Keaton? Comedies. Howard Hawks? Adventures, comedies, and comedy-adventures. And Joseph Mankiewicz? Well, anything you like.

Nor did he ever develop the kind of showy visual signature that can confer a sense of unity and coherence on a genre-crossing career. Like an English gentleman, he dressed his films so tastefully that no one would notice how they were styled. In this, he is the opposite of, say, a Stanley Kubrick, each of whose films looks exactly like a Kubrick film. It was not that Mankiewicz was indifferent to the way films looked - though it is telling that, even at the end of his career, he confessed never to having bothered to learn much about lenses and such - but he inclined to a style that humbly served story, character and dialogue. One kindly French critic typified this unassuming style as "classical", contrasting it with the ostentatious baroque of an Orson Welles. (French critics have traditionally been much more respectful of Mankiewicz than their Anglophone colleagues.)

In short, Mankiewicz's career rendered him more or less anonymous to moviegoers and frustrating to the type of modern critics who love to truffle out the traces of directorial sensibility recurring from film to film. Yet there are, in fact, a number of aspects common to all Mankiewicz's works; enough of them, anyway, to indicate his true strengths and weaknesses. He was a gifted writer long before he became a director, and his best dialogue is witty and articulate. The critic Richard Schickel called him "one of the tiny handful of epigrammists that have written for the screen", and, in an era when cub directors are often advised to worry about the pictures and let the words take care of themselves, that compliment remains entirely valid.

If Mankiewicz's dialogue isn't much quoted nowadays, it's because he excelled at the kind of lines that may look a little flat out of context, but shoot up like emergency flares when well delivered. Probably the most famous line he ever typed and filmed - "Fasten your seat belts - it's going to be a bumpy night" - reads fairly blandly on the page, but is a real zinger as spat from Bette Davis's curling, defiant lips in All About Eve. It has entered the American language (an episode of Frasier had the radio shrink saying it to the family dog, Eddie), much like the endearment "My little chickadee", which Mankiewicz wrote for WC Fields.

Often, his films contain a mouthpiece character - a sardonic, bitterly intelligent onlooker who represents Mankiewicz himself or some aspect of his temperament: the rich, manipulative Cecil Fox (played by Rex Harrison) in The Honey Pot, for instance. The supreme example is in All About Eve. Here, the Mankiewicz substitute is the theatre critic Addison DeWitt - played with deliciously suave, misanthropic disdain by George Sanders - who watches the machinations of the ambitious and the vulnerable denizens of his professional milieu with the detachment of an entomologist watching a war between ants.

All About Eve is set in the world of the theatre, a world that always fascinated Mankiewicz, and which he often, with the conventional middlebrow taste of his period, seemed to regard as essentially superior to movies. His films tend to be theatrical in both enriching and impoverishing ways. Even highly polished dialogue becomes tiresome when carried on too long, and Mankiewicz's productions are among the talkiest of talkies.

Predictably, Mankiewicz pined to work on the conventional stage rather than sound stages, and at the height of his career moved back from Los Angeles to New York so that he would have more opportunity to write and direct on Broadway (his contract obliged him to spend only 4 months a year on the coast). Most of his theatrical ambitions came to nothing, though his one venture into opera, a production of La Bohème for the Metropolitan, was well received on its first run and stayed in the repertoire for several years - after the more radical of Mankiewicz's directorial innovations were slowly and subtly censored, so as not to offend the more conservative members of the Met's audience.

His flair for intelligent dialogue is matched by a confident mastery of structure. All About Eve is so easy to follow that, on first viewing, you hardly notice how complex its unfolding can be. The tale is straightforward enough: a celebrated but ageing star (Bette Davis) is pursued by an ardent young fan (Anne Baxter) who gradually proves to be a hypocritical, mendacious monster of ambition and greed, and who rapidly becomes a star in her own right. Conventional stuff, on the face of it, but the whole thing is elaborated in an extended flashback - book-ended by the quite radical device of a long-held frozen frame - and is told by several different narrators, each of whom hands the telling of the tale on to the next voiceover like runners in a baton race.

The title of All About Eve is a mild pun - all about a female character called Eve Harrington, the lethally ambitious young actress, but also all about Everywoman. The nature of Adam, Mankiewicz observed on more than one occasion, was of far less interest to him as a dramatist than the nature of Eve. Adam was fairly simple, and his sons all have uncomplicated motivations; the daughters of Eve are varied and subtle, and so much more satisfying to write about. The only reason why Mankiewicz isn't classed as a director of woman's pictures is that the genre as generally understood inclines towards the soppy, and resolves either in happy endings or satisfyingly wrought misery. Mankiewicz wasn't much interested in warming hearts or jerking tears; his forte was detailed and precise observation, and though his female characters are not all strong, they are all complex and carefully drawn.

To put it delicately, Mankiewicz's interest in the opposite gender was not entirely a matter of art. Handsome, charming and attentive, he was a ladies' man of the old school - one of his paramours was a young (aged 20) Judy Garland - and though he did not have affairs with all his leading ladies, he tended to woo them as a director, so that amorousness would perfume their work together. Both as director and as seducer, he loved to listen to their life stories, especially their tales of misery and neurosis, and to play amateur psychiatrist or psychoanalyst.

But the question remains: for all of this psychological attentiveness to the feminine condition and his creative skills, did his work display anything more than old-fashioned professionalism? A response proposed by biographically inclined critics is that there is one particular theme common to quite a few of his better and more obviously personal films, that of the rivalrous relationship between an ambitious young person and an accomplished, often envied and emulated, older character. All About Eve fits the bill, as does The Quiet American, in which a world-weary writer competes with a youthful do-gooder for a beautiful Vietnamese girl; and as does, for that matter, Cleopatra, in which Antony is perpetually haunted by the terrible shadow of his predecessor in Cleopatra's bed, Julius Caesar.

In this pattern of generational aspiration, envy, aching love and fear of identity loss, some commentators have seen an echo of the sibling love and rivalry between Mankiewicz and his older brother Herman - a name immediately recognizable to all film buffs as the screenwriter of Citizen Kane. Herman was 12 years older than Joseph, and already famous and greatly admired in the industry, while Joseph was still struggling to establish himself, with more than a little help from his big brother. For about a decade, Joseph was very much "Mankiewicz Minor". People around the studios constantly stumbled over their names, so much so that Joseph once grumbled that "I know now what they will put on my tombstone: 'Here lies Herm - I mean, Joe Mankiewicz.'"

By the time of Herman's premature death at the age of 55, however, the roles had been entirely reversed. As Pauline Kael put it, since "there wasn't enough room for two Mankiewiczes in movie history, Herman became a parenthesis in the listings for Joe".

Did Mankiewicz ever attain greatness? Probably not, but he did make the cinema a place where one could expect to find witty, thoughtful dialogue, grown-up dramatic situations, and the kind of artistry that modestly conceals its own art. He deserves to be rediscovered by older viewers, and encountered for the first time by younger ones. In fact, he deserves to be a lot more famous.

Robert Mitchum archived interviews

Roger Ebert has a column today dedicated to Robert Mitchum, who Ebert says was his favorite movie star. He's always been a favorite of mine as well. Ebert has linked to his archives of four interviews he did with Mitchum; 3 of them between 1969 and 1971 and the 4th a tribute 20 years later.

He was my favorite movie star and my favorite interview.