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Best Picture Breakdown: There Will Be Blood

BuzzSugar — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 14:30:14 -0800

From now until the 2008 Oscars air on Sunday night, I'll be breaking down the five contenders for Best Picture, giving you the scoop on why each film could win and why it might not stand a chance. Today, I'm kicking off the series with a closer look at There Will Be Blood.

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is a stark and stunning look at greed, power, and success viewed through the lens of the oil boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s. The bulk of its acclaim has come for Daniel Day-Lewis's performance as tycoon Daniel Plainview, but the movie has many other things going for it, as its eight Oscar nominations - for diverse categories including cinematography and sound editing - show. To see how I think There Will Be Blood will fare in the Best Picture race, just read more.

Why It Might Win

Three words: Daniel Day-Lewis. His Daniel Plainview is a greed-driven maniac, neglecting all - social conventions, religion, even his own son - in the service of his quest for power, fortune, and oil, oil, oil. Delivering the year's biggest movie catchphrase ("I drink your milkshake") is just the icing on the cake.
It's well-rounded. As its Oscar nominations show, it's strong in a number of different filmmaking categories, from the visual (including Best Art Direction) to the auditory (Best Sound Editing). It's still a shame that Jonny Greenwood's score was disqualified, because his music added yet another compelling dimension to the film.
It's ambitious. Through its focus on Plainview (and its secondary story of Paul Dano's young prophet), it seeks to tell a bigger story about religion, greed, community, and fatherhood.

Why It Might Not Win

It could have used some editing. As I noted in my review, the movie is a series of interlocking conflicts that can, at times, detract from the central story. A few of the subplots just didn't feel necessary enough to justify the film's 158-minute running time.
Day-Lewis truly does make this movie. The Academy could be content with rewarding him with the Best Actor nod and giving the overall prize to another film.
It could be a victim of its own success. Its ambiguous ending could be frustrating for some viewers, and voters who heard the movie described as "the next Citizen Kane" could have expectations too high for this film to meet.

Chance of winning: Moderate to good

Photos courtesy of Paramount Vantage

Oscar Nominee: There Will Be Blood for Art Direction

BuzzSugar — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:30:53 -0800

In the days leading up to the Oscars, I'll be featuring the nominees in the various visual categories. This week, I've been looking at the nominees for Best Art Direction, which encompasses the entire look and feel of a film from the scenery to the lighting. Today brings us to the last of the nominees: There Will Be Blood.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson and gang did well with capturing the dangerous and spooky atmosphere of the oil industry at the beginning of the 1900s. Every frame portrays a dusty, dirty and oil-splattered world, all in that palette of slick blacks, coarse browns and sometimes fire-gold.

The film makes great use of its landscape, setting its characters against a barren desert or a shockingly blue sky. A few scenes - such as the one where an oil rig catches fire, ultimately tumbling to the ground in a heap of burning rubble - are particularly stark.

For more stills from There Will Be Blood, read more.

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Photos courtesy of Paramount Vantage

There Will Be Blood: Savagely Stirring

BuzzSugar — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 05:45:00 -0800

The opening scenes of There Will Be Blood are like a preview for the superb Daniel Day-Lewis performance to follow. For the movie's first 15 or so minutes, there is not a bit of dialog - only silence interspersed with the dissonant, deep-stringed musical score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. The action focuses solely on the grueling labor at hand. It's a striking way to start a story and also a metaphor for Day-Lewis's portrayal of Daniel Plainview, whose outbursts are as sinister as his silence and who lives for nothing but the pursuit of oil.

Based loosely on Upton Sinclair's Oil!, this movie is strange and hard to pigeonhole, and that's one of the main reasons I enjoyed it. It's a tale of two megalomaniacs, representing capitalist and religious greed, that at times has the feel of a horror film. The other big reason to savor There Will Be Blood is for Day-Lewis's eerie performance, which is hands down one of the year's best, so read more.

The majority of the movie's action takes place in the early 20th century in a small California town where Plainview has come to prospect with his 10-year-old son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier). If Plainview and his men find oil, he pledges to fund the local church, run by a weaselly little preacher named Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). Though the town eventually strikes it rich, the wealth comes at a cost, including disasters and family drama, failed attempts at religious conversion, and one heart-breaking accident.

Dano, who I loved in Little Miss Sunshine, is great as the politely manipulative Eli, a pre-TV version of a televangelist. And Day-Lewis is one of those rare actors totally consumed by a character - not because he puts on an accent or grows facial hair (although he does) but because everything about his manner and psyche seems transformed. With Plainview, he perfectly illustrates the struggle between greed versus compassion, creating a man so misanthropic, he cannot even bring himself to care about the people he longs to love.

The problem with There Will Be Blood is that it lacks a unified, tension-building plot and instead feels more like a series of interlocking conflicts. Director Paul Thomas Anderson chooses to focus more on the struggle between capitalism and religion than that of greed versus compassion, but by the shocking and riveting final scene, it's not clear which side he wants to win.

Photos courtesy of Paramount Vantage