There Will Be Blood

When we first see Daniel Plainview, he is in a hole, digging. And though over the course of the film a few details about his early life, such as a childhood in Wisconsin are mentioned, we never lose the impression that he seems to have been born in the earth, sui generis. He is not so much a human being as an embodiment of a certain hunger. Like Shaw’s Mr. Undershaft, Plainview operates on a different plain than those around him.

What exactly is he hungering for? Oil, to start, but oil gives him money and power, and with that money and power he can remove himself from society, for as he desires above all to be apart from humanity.

Plainview, as ferociously acted by Daniel Day-Lewis, is the heart of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Adapted from a novel by Upton Sinclair which has been read by almost nobody (my English professor friend Paula understatedly told me Sinclair is “out of favor”), this is Anderson’s way of staging an epic battle between the forces of commerce and capitalism on one side and religion on the other. Plainview has no use for religion, but in order to buy land that sits atop “an ocean of oil” and curry favor with locals, he has to humor a local preacher, Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano. Sunday is no fool, and seems to see right through Plainview (admittedly not very difficult), and the two engage in a conflict that lasts over several years.

The beginning of this film is brilliant. There isn’t a word of dialogue spoken for perhaps ten minutes, as Plainview is shown as a solitary prospector for gold, then an oil man hitting his first gusher. It is during this gusher that the infant son of one of his workers, in symbolism that edges into the heavy-handed, has a spot of crude oil daubed on his forehead–baptized in oil, as it were. That worker ends up getting killed, and Plainview adopts the child and makes him his partner, even though, when we next see him, he is only about ten years old.

Then the film shifts to the Sunday ranch. It is Eli’s twin brother, also played by Dano, who tips off Plainview about what he might find there. Eli is a Charismatic and a healer, and the juxtaposition between his world and Plainview’s is sort of a fundamental schism in American society–this is a country run by business, but spiritually we’re still awash in superstition.

Though the film is based on a work by Sinclair, who most famously wrote The Jungle and was a crusader for socialist causes, There Will Be Blood is not a manifesto. It seems more like something out of Flannery O’Connor, bordering on the grotesque. Plainview is something of a monster. When his adopted son loses his hearing in an industrial accident, Plainview loses interest in him and packs him off to a school for the deaf. Eli seizes on this and makes Plainview confess his sins during a church service. Many years later, though, in the film’s final scene, Plainview gets his revenge.

I liked his film a great deal, but I would withhold a half a star, and it’s difficult to put my finger on why. It is certainly a handsome production, with excellent photography, production design, and costumes (personal note–the costume designer for this film, as well as all of Anderson’s films, is Mark Bridges, who I went to college with. We acted in several plays together, but he was also more interested in costumes). The music, by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood, is a bit jarring at first, considering it is very modern, but considering the modernist movement in classical music began at roughly the time of the film, it isn’t too outlandish.

I guess I just had a little trouble with the structure of the film. Aside from the center section, the rest is a series of discrete scenes that don’t provide a completely satisfying journey. The film’s last scene jumps several years into the future, and it just seemed a littel jarring. This is quibbling, though, and I add this only to distinguish this film from others this year, like Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, and Atonement, which I thought better created a whole.

Daniel Plainview is in every scene of the picture, and the work of Day-Lewis is extraordinary. He’s just plumb scary. There is a scene where he is in the ocean, a wave crashing over him, as he comes to the conclusion that someone is trying to deceive him, and the look on his face is intensity squared. And in the final scene, well, I don’t want to spoil too much, but could any other actor do so much with the word “drainage?” Day-Lewis has an incredible range as an actor–I’ve always thought the best way to experience this is to watch A Room With a View and Gangs of New York back to back and try to convince yourself it’s the same actor, but you could cook up a second double-feature with The Age of Innocence and this film. The man is just scary good.