cbsreview: There Will Be Blood

1. I first saw it in Boogie Nights. Then in Magnolia. It happened again last Saturday after seeing There Will Be Blood. People going out of the theater after the movie ended had their heads bow down low in a complete rejection of eye contact with anybody. It is a socio-cinematic phenomenon that could not be named other than PaulThomasAndersonitis. I can name two reasons for the bowing of heads. Moviegoers were either humbled by what they had just seen, or closer to Reason, they were evading the gaze of the next guy who may have been ready to ask, Pardon me sir, but can you tell me, what the fuck was that?, and they were too afraid to ask in return, Uh, how the hell would I know?

2. Truth is, There Will Be Blood is not a complicated movie, it's theme being nothing more than what we all know since we started knowing things: money is the root of all evil.

3. In TWBB, Daniel Day Lewis is Daniel Plainview, a ruthless oilman who, we are shown right at the opening sequence of the film, how he acquires much of the things he continues to possess the rest of the way: the bad leg, the back back, the bad nose, the bad craving for money. He starts as a one-man mining firm. With makeshift equipment he falls into his pit but manages to get out of the hole, out of the gorge, out of the mountains, to reach the shop of buyer of rock he mined from the quarry - doing all these while crawling on his back. The effort is a killer, daig pa ang relihiyosong naglakad ng paluhod. And so we come to realize that, after all, there is reason for this guy to learn to adore his money.

4. The conflict starts when a young guy offers to sell him a lead, or a prospect, to an oilfield. When the transaction is fulfilled, we get to know the other members of this fantastic entourage, most prominent being the brother of the seller of the prospect (both brothers are played by the same guy, Paul Dano, who gave us more than a glimpse of his oozing talent as the angtsy Nietzche-adoring kid in Little Miss Sunshine).

5. There are two scenes in the movie that will continue to haunt me into the future. One is when Paul Dano, as the preacher Eli Sunday, tries to cast out "evil" from the arthritic body of an old congregant. Not only was he believable as a fanatic, he somehow convinces us that he is, in real life, a fanatic, and that fanaticism is a scary thing.

6. The other scene is when Plainview's son, HW, falls from the makeshift rig after oil spewed from the earth like a gushing Old Faithful. While being rushed to safety by his father, the young boy screams, I cannot hear my voice, telling us the harrowing effect of oil explosion on his eardrum and very being.

7. In scenes involving the young HW, acting as deaf child, the musical score (my brother told me this was by the guitarist of Radiohead) is classical - violin and piano - and seemingly out-of-context (because the scenes are in an oilfield in the middle of the desert, and those in the scene are all sullied and filthy from dust and oil smears), and I cannot help but think if there is an allussion to Mozart in the kid. But of course the entire film, not just the score, is eccentric, including the acting of Lewis', Dano's, the young kid's, and Lewis' chief honcho's. In some of their monologues, I half-expected them to look straight to the camera, towards the audience, stick out their tongues, and blurt out, "Belat"!

8. The big Belat, however, is probably directed by Anderson to all those who will not dare see this movie for refusing their own prospects of bowing their head down low by the end of the film.