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 New York

Americans like to believe that it’s the men in possession of steadfast morals along with callused hands who rise to prominence and take pride in an origin myth that proclaims our country to be nourished solely by the blood and sweat of heroic common people. An alternative history of the U.S. exists, however, one left out of textbooks and starring the scam artists, snake-oil salesmen and supershady industrialists who share the credit for turning the great democratic experiment into what it is today.

Where someone like Daniel Plainview, the stoic figure at the center of There Will Be Blood, falls on the scale isn’t obvious right away. When we meet Plainview (Day-Lewis), he’s a silver miner in search of his fortune, using only the sparks from a pickax to light his way. By the time we leave the character, he’s sequestered in a mansion, a bitter robber baron raging at the heavens. How he goes from rugged individualist to rotting, soulless millionaire—and what that arc says about the dark heart of our nation’s capitalistic obsessions—is the meat of Paul Thomas Anderson’s American masterpiece.

Yes, we know: that word again. But the writer-director’s attempt to map the moment when bootstrap mentality curdles into cutthroat corporate culture earns the title. There hasn’t been a more breathtaking, damning portrait of frontier paranoia since McCabe & Mrs. Miller; let’s hope audiences don’t take as long as they did with Altman’s nouveau Western to realize what they have before them.

It’s oil that provides Plainview’s meal ticket. Along with a young orphan (Freasier), the budding petroleum entrepreneur constructs the facade of a family business. Then he gets a tip about an untapped source in a small California town. Plainview strikes black gold in a big way, while an accident and the local Holy Roller evangelist (Dano) threaten his derrick-dotted Eden.

Up to this point, Anderson has liberally borrowed from Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, which also chronicles the meteoric rise of a crude-covered self-made man. Then the director jettisons his muckraking source to introduce a long-lost brother (O’Connor), and the story shifts into a character-study mode that sheds light on our hero’s psyche. “I have a competition in me,” Plainview admits. “I want to see people fail.” Even before the acrid smell of success filled his nostrils, the would-be tycoon’s driving ambition to conquer fueled a damaged sense of humanity. Throw money into the mix—along with betrayal and mental breakdowns—and you have the recipe for a 20th-century monster.

You would expect someone of Daniel Day-Lewis’s thorough commitment and caliber to create a strikingly realistic character hardened by work and emotional scars. Yet that still doesn’t prepare you for the performance he gives here. The star wisely locates the emotional vulnerabilities of this Mephistopheles of industry and then lets them surface only in snippets; like Plainview, whose name couldn’t be more ironic, the actor keeps everything as close to the vest as possible. Until, naturally, he doesn’t: Once the oilman starts unraveling, reticence is replaced by outrageous displays of dog-barking and slurred promises of throat-slitting. All of which ends in a climax, set in a personal bowling alley, that takes bat-shit insanity to a whole new level of baroque. Like Day-Lewis’s Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, this expressionistic psychopath decimates everything in his path; unlike Scorsese’s stillborn megillah, this historical melodrama is sturdy enough to support Day-Lewis’s drooling, demonic dervish without being overshadowed by him.

But There Will Be Blood belongs, foremost, to Anderson. Like many filmmakers of his generation, he’s not shy about showing off his cinematic influences: You can spot references to Days of Heaven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Citizen Kane nestled among the period trappings. But unlike most Netflix auteurs, this artist seems connected to a world outside his DVD collection. Even sprawling works like Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999) never hinted that he had a movie this complex and epic in him. Anderson isn’t trying to imitate the directors who made grand social statements so much as prove he’s worthy of joining their pantheon. This fearless indictment of the Rockefellers, Du Ponts and Dohenys who helped build this nation—and rot its foundation—has done just that.