p e n g u i n d e v i l

We finally watched There Will Be Blood. I meant to watch this a year ago, as we read Oil! in my old Book Group not too long after the movie came out… Some of them even went to go and see it after we read it, though I did not go along. So as I really, really liked the book, and the movie did look to be exciting, I quite wanted to see it, even though I heard that it wasn’t so much a film version of the book as it was a movie based on portions of the book.

Now that I’ve seen it, and keeping that in mind, I feel the need to look at it from two perspectives. First off, as a movie in its own merits. I certainly thought that it was quite good… Very well made, well acted and well shot. It really just looked and felt great. It was a dark, compelling and engrossing drama, and quite well written… Except for some aspects I’ll mention below.





Daniel Day Lewis is quiet good as Daniel Plainview, a self-made Oil man in the early part of the 20th century. When he gets a hint that some goat farmer might have some oil under his land, he takes his son and goes to take a look. That’s where the meat of the story starts. He encounters Eli Sunday, a self-made preacher and prophet, whose father’s land is the land he is after. Eli is played by Paul Dano who does a really great job. He steals every scene he is in with his down-home yet intense fervor.





Most of the rest of the characters are either peripheral or their roles don’t last through enough of the movie to make much of an impact. Plainview’s son, H.W., seems a major character but ends up more as a plot device and Plainview brother is really the only other key character, but the relationship between Plainview and Eli is really the meat of this film. While Plainview starts off as a driven and independent man as the movie (and many years) progress he becomes very much bitter, abrasive and misanthropic. Exactly why doesn’t seem clear and this is one minor aspect of the area that I thought that the film suffered in. There are many things in this story that seem to have much more implied than witnessed, giving the feeling that you’ve missed something, especially involving Plainview and his son. Which I thought was interesting… Considering that the key difference between the book and the film is that the lead character has been switched from the son to the father.





As for the movie as it relates to Oil!, the novel of origin. If you haven’t read the book, then watching the movie won’t give the book away because the movie has a completely different focus. But they were kind enough to change the title, so that should serve as some warning that There Will Be Blood might not be the same as the book. The oil back drop and some of the characters are taken from the book, but that’s it. The book is told from the son’s point of view and is primarily the story of him growing from a child into an adult and discovering the truths behind labor, business, society, love and politics. His life revolves around his father and the oil business, but he is obsessed by the character Paul, the brother of the preacher Eli. Paul has a total of one scene in the movie and is barely referred to afterwords. The son is basically a non-speaking role, and in fact, the father here is cut from a much different (and less pleasant) bit of cloth than in the book.


I would thought, highly recommend both. Oil! is just one of the best epic novels I have ever read and There Will Be Blood, for all of its differences that I found unsatisfying is still a great and engrossing film. And one that I believe I would enjoy even more a second time around (having gotten my preconceived notions out of the way)!





We also tried, unsuccessfully, to watch I’m Not There. This film felt like a confusing and pretentious mess, though I suspect that was intentional. Admittedly, I’m not a Dylan fan but I feel that even if I was, I would find this homage to the many brilliant geniuses that apparently are Bob Dylan to be tiring. Having a different actor play each phase was interesting and, I thought, clever… But the movie was too full of dull arty cleverness to really be worth sting all the way through. Rather than a life story, it is more like a collection of fictionalized vignettes of “how it might have happened to the great Dylan”. We only made it about halfway through, stopping, oddly enough, during the Cate Blanchett part, which was easily the best portion of the movie up to the point. Well, except for the scene when he unleashes the electric guitars at the Newport folk festival, an admittedly historic moment that has always been my favorite Dylan antic.