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THERE WILL BE BLOOD
- Written and directed
- by Paul Thomas Anderson
- Starring Daniel Day-Lewis
- and Paul Dano
- Classification: PG
- Rating:
***½
Rising sky-high on a geyser of critical praise, Paul Thomas Anderson's intense and strange new film about the early days of the oil industry, There Will Be Blood, has already been declared a masterpiece and compared to the films of Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick. This perhaps proves only that speculation about the films' future reputations is at least as fevered as it is about oil prices.
Anderson, the director of the bold ensemble epics Boogie Nights and Magnolia, and the dark comedy Punch-Drunk Love, has been the great hope of American cinema since Quentin Tarantino buried himself in his exploitation niche. But perhaps critics' great expectations have blinded them to the movie's flaws. That's not to say that There Will Be Blood isn't something exceptional; it's just that the movie is jarringly erratic, ranging from moments of delicacy to majesty to over-the-top bombast.
Shot in the same part of scrub-filled Texas desert as the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men, in a world of torn-from-history ramshackle oil towns, the movie was shot with striking composition and flowing camera movement by Robert Elswit (Michael Clayton, Magnolia). The mood, thanks to the unnerving, dissonant orchestral score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, is more horror movie than nostalgic western, as befits the story about a monster.
The biography of the rampant egoist is a great theme in American literature and film, from Moby Dick to The Great Gatsby to Citizen Kane. There are elements of all of them in Daniel Plainview, an indomitable American prospector-turned-oil baron in the early years of the 20th century.
Running at 2½ hours, the film is lashed together by biographical moments spanning 30 years, tracing Plainview's relationships with his adopted son and rivalry with a gawky, opportunistic evangelist, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano, of Little Miss Sunshine, fulminating and squeaking with absurd holy fervour).
Most of the characters have biblical names and the movie is saturated with religious spectacle (though the theology doesn't seem more sophisticated than the raining frogs in Anderson's Magnolia). Profits compete with prophets as the film traces the era's twin boom in the oil business and big-time religion. The language draws contrasts between the demonic jets of black oil and the Blood of the Lamb.
The analogy between religious hucksterism and the oil business comes from Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, the inspiration for Anderson's screenplay. Anderson lifts a speech or two of technical oil-drilling talk and the basic father-son dynamic from the first third of the novel, but otherwise the relationship to the source material is distant. Sinclair's novel focuses on the character of the oil man's son and his socialist awakening against the backdrop of the early 20th century. Anderson's screenplay, which has little historical context, feels more like an allegory in search of a meaning, somehow tied to the transition from the end of the wild west to modern industrial America.
The whole movie is carried, and at times carried away, by Daniel Day-Lewis's electrifying, larger-than-life performance. Usually seen with a broad-brimmed hat jammed down in his head, eyes hooded and with a profile like a bird of prey, Lewis doesn't open his mouth for almost the first 15 minutes of the film, during which we see him as a prospector, scraping in a hole in the desert like an insect, prospecting for silver. By the end of the sequence, the prospector has shattered his leg in an accident, and with ferocious determination, dragged himself out of the pit and to an assaying office, to get his claim tested.
Three years later, his mine keeps filling up with black muck, which turns out to be oil; a second accident kills a co-worker and single-father. Plainview takes his toddler, and we see him riding away on a train with the boy, leaning in to stare at him with curiosity, and possibly affection.
When Plainview finally does speak at any length, nine years later in 1911, his voice resonates with the unexpectedly oratorical tones of the late actor and director John Huston. The speech, a sales pitch from Plainview to a group of homeowners wanting to lease their land for oil drilling, is lifted from Sinclair's book, with all the quirks of slang and dialect removed, showing a savvy, gregarious-sounding man speaking plain people's talk. (Plainview isn't the only person who speaks strangely in the movie. No one uses curses, slang or even contractions.) By now, Plainview is travelling with his adolescent adopted son, cryptically named H.W. (the self-possessed Dillon Freasier), who he describes as his partner and uses as proof that he's a family man. He shares his business plans with the boy, who is both a business prop and an inheritor of his legacy.
When he's tipped off about the presence of oil in a rural area, Daniel takes his son on a supposed hunting trip to the ranch, owned by a religious, impoverished family. He manages to underpay them for their ranch, and quietly begins buying up all the property in the area, atop an "ocean" of oil.
With success comes a mess of complications. The first and most enduring is Eli Sunday, canny son of the devout, simple family that Plainview previously swindled. Sunday builds a congregation of believers in his so-called Church of the Third Revelation, and begins to challenge Plainview's authority as a rival empire-builder.
Next comes a hobo named Henry (Kevin J. O'Connor), claiming to be Daniel's half-brother and looking for work. As the two men start talking one night, Daniel lets his guard down, and confesses to an extreme misanthropy that, until now, was unapparent. The speech is long and precisely articulated, filled with a breathtaking contempt that would cause most people to grab their backpacks and run. "There's a competition in me. I hate most people. I've built up my hatreds over the years little by little," he says, and adds: "I want to earn enough money I can get away from everyone." The speech is chilling but problematic. Given that Plainview started out "away from everyone" as a hermit prospector, his need for money to escape doesn't make sense. Nor have we had any motive or advance warning for this seething hatred from a man who, until now, has displayed a self-interested conviviality. Overall, this transformation of rugged individualism into sociopathology feels less like social criticism than a narrative convenience. In contrast to Upton Sinclair, Anderson doesn't seem to have any quarrel with soul-destroying, rampant capitalism, nor is there evidence Plainview ever had a soul to destroy. For all we know of his background, Plainview might as well have been spawned in the oily pit where we first met him.
Sketchy in human motivation, heavy-handed in its symbolism, There Will Be Blood stands, primarily, as an exercise in grotesque portraiture. Day-Lewis roars through the psychological holes with such obsessed intensity the motives don't seem to matter. The performance grows progressively more theatrical and bizarre, and by the end, Anderson seems content to sit back and watch his star let rip. In one hair-raising scene in which he submits to a church baptism at the hands of his rival, Eli Sunday, in order to advance his business interests, the actor's coiled tension is so extreme he threatens to pop through the screen. What's so exciting is the way Day-Lewis shows the character's struggle for restraint.
No such luck in the movie's final sequence, set in 1927, which sees Plainview as a millionaire hermit, engaging in final confrontations with both his grown son and his rival Eli. The movie's final screaming crescendo sees Plainview, shuffling on his bad leg, apparently living in a two-lane bowling alley in the basement of his mansion. Conjure up the maddest despot scene you can remember - Richard the Third's battle scene, Jimmy Cagney in White Heat, Al Pacino at the end of Scarface - and you might get a sense of the seismic register of Day-Lewis's extravagant performance. Watch and marvel, though you may have to suspend your disbelief from the top of an oil derrick.
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