There Will Be Blood (2007)
"There Will Be Blood" with Dillon Freasier, left, and Daniel Day-Lewis, opens on Wednesday.
An American Primitive, Forged in a Crucible of Blood and Oil
“There Will Be Blood,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s
epic American nightmare, arrives belching fire and brimstone and
damnation to Hell. Set against the backdrop of the Southern California
oil boom of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, it tells a story of
greed and envy of biblical proportions — reverberating with Old
Testament sound and fury and New Testament evangelicalism — which Mr.
Anderson has mined from Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel “Oil!” There is no
God but money in this oil-rich desert and his messenger is Daniel
Plainview, a petroleum speculator played by a monstrous and shattering Daniel Day-Lewis.
Plainview is an American primitive. He’s more articulate and
civilized than the crude, brutal title character in Frank Norris’s 1899
novel “McTeague,” and Erich von Stroheim’s masterly version of the same, “Greed.”
But the two characters are brothers under the hide, coarse and
animalistic, sentimental in matters of love and ruthless in matters of
avarice. Mr. Anderson opens his story in 1898, closer to Norris’s novel
than Sinclair’s, which begins in the years leading up to World War I.
And the film’s opener is a stunner — spooky and strange, blanketed in
shadows and nearly wordless. Inside a deep, dark hole, a man pickaxes
the hard-packed soil like a bug gnawing through dirt. This is the earth
mover, the ground shaker: Plainview.
Over the next two and a half mesmerizing hours Plainview will
strike oil, then strike it rich and transform a bootstrapper’s dream
into a terrifying prophecy about the coming American century. It’s a
century he plunges into slicked in oil, dabbed with blood and
accompanied by H. W. (eventually played by the newcomer Dillon
Freasier), the child who enters his life in 1902 after he makes his
first strike and seems to have burbled from the ground like the liquid
itself. The brief scenes of Plainview’s first tender, awkward moments
with H. W. will haunt the story. In one of the most quietly lovely
images in a film of boisterous beauty, he gazes at the tiny, pale
toddler, chucking him under the chin as they sit on a train very much
alone.
“There Will Be Blood” involves a tangle of relationships,
mainly intersecting sets of fathers and sons and pairs of brothers.
(Like most of the finest American directors working now, Mr. Anderson
makes little on-screen time for women.) But it is Plainview’s intense,
needful bond with H. W. that raises the stakes and gives enormous
emotional force to this expansively imagined period story with its
pictorial and historical sweep, its raging fires, geysers of oil and
inevitable blood. (Rarely has a film’s title seemed so ominous.) By the
time H. W. is about 10, he has become a kind of partner to his father,
at once a child and a sober little man with a jacket and neatly combed
hair who dutifully stands by Plainview’s side as quiet as his
conscience.
A large swath of the story takes place in 1911, by which
point Plainview has become a successful oilman with his own
fast-growing company. Flanked by the watchful H. W., he storms through
California, sniffing out prospects and trying to persuade frenzied men
and women to lease their land for drilling. (H. W. gives Plainview his
human mask: “I’m a family man,” he proclaims to perspective leasers.)
One day a gangling, unsmiling young man, Paul Sunday (Paul Dano),
arrives with news that oil is seeping out of the ground at his family’s
ranch. The stranger sells this information to Plainview, who promptly
sets off with H. W. to a stretch of California desert where oil puddles
the ground among the cactus, scrub and human misery.
Not long afterward oil is gushing out of that desert. The
eruption rattles both the earth and the local population, whom
Plainview soothes with promises. Poor, isolated, thirsting for water
(they don’t have enough even to grow wheat), the dazed inhabitants gaze
at the oilman like hungry baby birds. (Their barren town is oddly named
Little Boston.) He promises schools, roads and water, delivering his
sermon with a carefully enunciated, sepulchral voice that Mr. Day-Lewis
seems to have largely borrowed from the director John Huston.
Plainview is preaching a new gospel, though one soon challenged by
another salesman, Paul Sunday’s Holy Roller brother, Eli (also Mr.
Dano). A charismatic preacher looking to build a new church, Eli
slithers into the story, one more snake in the desert
Mr. Anderson has always worn his influences openly, cribbing from Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman among others (he helped the ailing Altman with his final film, “A Prairie Home Companion”),
but rarely has his movie love been as organically integrated into his
work as it is here. Movie history weighs on every filmmaker, informs
every cut, camera angle and movement. “There Will Be Blood” is very
much a personal endeavor for Mr. Anderson; it feels like an act of
possession. Yet it is also directly engaged with our cinematically
constructed history, specifically with films — “Greed” and “Chinatown,” but also “Citizen Kane”
— that have dismantled the mythologies of American success and, in
doing so, replaced one utopian ideal for another, namely that of the
movies themselves.
This is Mr. Anderson’s fifth feature and it proves a
breakthrough for him as a filmmaker. Although there are more
differences than similarities between it and the Sinclair book, the
novel has provided him with something he has lacked in the past, a
great theme. It may also help explain the new film’s narrative
coherence. His first feature, “Sydney”
(also known as “Hard Eight”), showed Mr. Anderson to be an intuitively
gifted filmmaker, someone who was born to make images with a camera.
His subsequent features — “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia” and “Punch-Drunk Love”
— have ambition and flair, though to increasingly diminished ends.
Elliptical, self-conscious, at times multithreaded, they contain
passages of clarity and brilliance. But in their escalating stylization
you feel the burdens of virtuosity, originality, independence.
“There Will Be Blood” exhibits much the same qualities as Mr.
Anderson’s previous work — every shot seems exactly right — but its
narrative form is more classical and less weighted down by the
pressures of self-aware auteurism. It flows smoothly, linearly,
building momentum and unbearable tension. Mr. Day-Lewis’s outsize
performance, with its footnote references to Huston and strange,
contorted Kabuki-like grimaces, occasionally breaks the skin of the
film’s surface like a dangerous undertow. The actor seems to have
invaded Plainview’s every atom, filling an otherwise empty vessel with
so much rage and purpose you wait for him to blow. It’s a thrilling
performance, among the greatest I’ve seen, purposefully alienating and
brilliantly located at the juncture between cinematic realism and
theatrical spectacle.
This tension between realism and spectacle runs like a
fissure through the film and invests it with tremendous unease. You are
constantly being pulled away from and toward the charismatic Plainview,
whose pursuit of oil reads like a chapter from this nation’s grand
narrative of discovery and conquest. His 1911 strike puts the
contradictions of this story into graphic, visual terms. Mr. Anderson
initially thrusts you close to the awesome power of the geyser, which
soon bursts into flames, then pulls back for a longer view, his
sensuously fluid camera keeping pace with Plainview and his men as they
race about trying to contain what they’ve unleashed. But the monster
has been uncorked. The black billowing smoke pours into the sky, and
there it will stay.
With a story of and for our times, “There Will Be Blood” can
certainly be viewed through the smeary window that looks onto the
larger world. It’s timeless and topical, general and specific, abstract
and as plain as the name of its fiery oilman. It’s an origin story of
sorts. The opening images of desert hills and a droning electronic
chord allude to the beginning of “2001: A Space Odyssey,”
whose murderous apes are part of a Darwinian continuum with Daniel
Plainview. But the film is above all a consummate work of art, one that
transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its
pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites,
disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness
itself.
“There Will Be Blood” is rated R (Under 17
requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). As the title warns,
there will be blood.
THERE WILL BE BLOOD
Opens in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday.
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson; written by Mr. Anderson, based on the novel “Oil!” by Upton Sinclair; director of photography, Robert Elswit; edited by Dylan Tichenor;
music by Jonny Greenwood; production designer, Jack Fisk; produced by
Mr. Anderson, JoAnne Sellar and Daniel Lupi; released by Paramount
Vantage and Miramax Films. Running time: 2 hours 38 minutes.
WITH: Daniel Day-Lewis (Daniel Plainview), Paul Dano (Paul Sunday/Eli Sunday), Kevin J. O’Connor (Henry), Ciaran Hinds (Fletcher) and Dillon Freasier (H. W.).
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