Film

There Will Be Blood (2007)

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Synopsis

Paul Thomas Anderson’s first feature since 2002’s ‘Punch-Drunk Love’ is loosely adapted from ‘Oil!’, Upton Sinclair’s novel about, er, oil. The turn-of-the-century Texas setting could offer allegorical potential, while the rarely-seen Daniel Day-Lewis’ starring role as budding tycoon Daniel Plainview confirms this as one to watch.

Movie review

From Time Out Chicago

From its opening scene, There Will Be Blood announces itself as an heir to 2001: A Space Odyssey. With a soundtrack shriek that’s pure Kubrick, the camera fades up on an untamed landscape, where lone prospector Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) chips away in a hole. He’s driven by the equivalent of 2001’s monolith—in this case, oil: the substance that will inform everything he does, and that will make him wealthy to a point where wealth becomes his only interest.

Black gold eventually pours from the ground, of course, and when it does, a fellow prospector’s child is immediately baptized with it; Anderson spatters the lens with oil, too, initiating us into Plainview’s faith. Blood may tip its hat to John Ford and notions of collective ambition, but at bottom it’s a story of individual obsession—and may inspire a similar obsession in viewers. This is the most original and compelling Western in a year of Westerns: so new, so bleached of conventional beauty and so alienating (thanks in part to a nerve-jangling score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood) that it might as well be set on Mars.

The movie alludes to Days of Heaven, Giant, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Citizen Kane, but it’s every inch a P.T. Anderson film. Blood is not a departure from his style (as some have suggested) but a refinement, seizing on the notions of family and commerce that ran through Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999) and reworking them on a different plane. Anderson pares down Upton Sinclair’s 1926 muckraking novel Oil! to an archetypal, even operatic tale of greed and competition, culminating in an ending that’s as much a shock to the system as the frogs in Magnolia.

This may sound like fatal self-importance, but Anderson is gifted enough to pull it off; in a sense, he’s as thirsty as his protagonist. The narrative follows the imposing, slippery, increasingly satanic Plainview, who learns from runaway Paul Sunday (Dano) that land with oil can be leased cheaply in the town of Little Boston, California. Little Boston’s Bible-thumping residents—and particularly Paul’s preacher twin brother, Eli Sunday (also Dano)—are happy to take low prices to fund their church; for Plainview, that’s like throwing money into a void.

The notion of oil as a kind of false religion comes from Sinclair’s book. (The Jungle author describes it as “an evil Power which roams the earth, crippling the bodies of men and women, and luring the nations to destruction by visions of unearned wealth, and the opportunity to enslave and exploit labor.”) And as one might expect considering the source, Blood invites a political reading, both in its literal equation of blood with oil and its portrayal of mutual exploitation between evangelicals and capitalists.

But Anderson’s adaptation—which spans less than a third of the novel—dispenses with most historical reference points; it’s less concerned with the mechanics of strikes and unionization than with Plainview and his snowballing greed. For Plainview, every interaction is a business deal; everything he possesses, from his oil to his stolen orphan son, H.W. (Freasier), has been literally or metaphorically leased. The residents of Little Boston see him as a gift from God, but even his generosity—as when he buys a new dress for Paul and Eli’s battered sister (Sydney McCallister)—serves as a mirror for his own power.

Cinematographer Robert Elswit creates a visual style perfectly suited to the story—you’d be hard-pressed to find another Hollywood film this decade that makes a more searing use of natural light. Note the streaming rays of sun that look down, as if from heaven, into the depths of the oil pits; the hellfire of a burning derrick; or the cascading glints of sunlight as Plainview and H.W. lie on the cabin floor, covered in oil from an explosion.

As for Day-Lewis’s performance, sometimes the only two words that will do are holy shit; he’s an actor known for burrowing into his roles, here paired with a director eager to see exactly how deep he’ll go. His mustached monster is an improvement on Gangs of New York’s Bill the Butcher—more frightening and less cartoonish, even when (in the exchange of the year) he taunts a cohort about a milk shake. For all his aspirations to Kubrick’s throne, Anderson is finally a moralist. The last image is one of decisive solitude, showing Plainview amid the fruits of his ambition, with no one left to share them.