The Best Film of Last Year

I hate to make faux-definitive statements like this, but There Will Be Blood was unjustly buried by the hype of No Country For Old Men last year. Both are great films, but There Will Be Blood is much, much greater. I imagine, fifty years from now, when I dust off the few of my old DVDs or Blu-rays that I keep around (since movies with be beamed directly into our skulls, obviously), at the end of the day I'll still have 2001: A Space Odyssey, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, and, among others, There Will Be Blood.

I watched it on DVD last night, even though I saw it in the theater a scant few months prior. And I finally pinned down why I vastly prefer it to No Country.

No Country For Old Men is good because it picked a tone and stuck with it. It's sparse, quiet, and tense. But it's just a trick. The film ends exactly where it started. It follows a formula; the easiest indicator is how everyone in the film speaks in near-monotone, indifferent. Some would say it's a regional thing, but I think it simply follows a few hard-and-fast rules that the Coens wrote down before they started production.

Also, the ending is terrible. The whole film prior works as a non-verbal experience, and the last fifteen minutes are simply people sitting around and talking.

But There Will Be Blood? That's a thrilling film, both organic and methodical. It grows with a sort of terrifying undercurrent. I like it the same reason I like The Godfather, and that's because of the amazing performances. But while the triumph of The Godfather is the ensemble, here it's two men: Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano, sparring the entire film up to its strange-but-necessary climax.

Both There Will Be Blood and No Country are also gorgeous films; the former's cinematography by Roger Elswit (which won the Academy Award) and the latter's by Roger Deakins. There Will Be Blood has a sort of sparse, haunting elegance to its visuals, which is the same reason why I list 2001 as one of my favorite films (a film that doesn't center around any particular performance or any particular character).

So it's strange when two great films come out in a single year and, in the popular consciousness, the winning of a few awards of one makes the other obsolete. In this case, No Country won Best Picture, so most people browsing the shelves at Blockbuster will probably pick it up instead of There Will Be Blood. (Then again, most casual moviegoers I know who saw both films because of my recommendations found each too slow to enjoy. I don't entirely blame them.)

Another thing: While I enjoyed Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson made an inspired career move to go from sprawling dramas to intensely focused films, such as Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood. And the man is only 37! I consider him up there with Terrence Malick as one of the best directors in modern American cinema. He might be my next Stanley Kubrick.