Striking Oil

There Will Be Blood explodes with greed and corruption.

by Shaun Brady

	print	email	reply	rss feed

Published: Jan 2, 2008

HE KNOWS THE DRILL: Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) wins the crowd with his charm. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Recommended

"Restraint" has never been a word one could apply to the films of Paul Thomas Anderson. He specializes in sprawling, motor-mouthed epics, proudly vulgar in execution and intent.

There Will Be Blood is different, though it can't be called restrained. It's more of an exercise in restraint, the writer/director calling attention to himself not by using every trick in his arsenal, but by calling to mind the fact that he could use them, but purposefully isn't. The approach calls to mind Adam Sandler's character in Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, so brimming with rage that he compresses into himself until the point when he explodes. And There Will Be Blood does explode: After more than two hours of deliberately calculated tension, the final moments erupt like a sociopath firing blindly into a crowd.

In many ways, this is, in fact, a sociopathic film. It's the study of a self-confessed misanthrope that worms its way so deeply into his point of view that it becomes impossible to look upon any other character in the film without an intensely jaundiced eye — and most of them seem to live up to that distrust.

Anderson would be hard-pressed to thrust such an unpleasant personality onto the screen for such an extended time without an actor of Daniel Day-Lewis' stature to embody him. But Day-Lewis creates an impossibly fascinating human being with the power to compel rapt attention but wholly rebuff scrutiny. "I am an oilman," he announces repeatedly when attempting to sway landowners to turn over their land to his drilling endeavors. And while his fortune has undoubtedly been made by his ability to extract black gold from the ground, he is at least as effective in peddling oil of the more reptilian variety.

Day-Lewis endows his Daniel Plainview with a voice that sounds like Sean Connery doing a Jack Palance impersonation, its cadences hypnotically calibrated. The entire first reel passes without a single word being spoken, instead offering a succession of images capturing the life of toil consisting of men and machinery, oil and blood. It's perhaps the most surprising aspect of the entire film, given the usual barrage of dialogue that fills Anderson's soundtracks. But once Day-Lewis begins to speak, the musicality of his words turns on like a faucet that you can't bring yourself to turn off, even as the water rises over your head.

The bulk of the film's action traces Plainview's dealings with evangelical preacher Eli Sunday, whose family owns a considerable tract of oil-rich land. Paul Dano plays both Eli and, possibly, his brother Paul — it's never made clear whether Paul actually exists. His only appearance is to lure Plainview and company to his family's land, his apparent dimwittedness leaving the oilman unprepared for his more savvy preacher brother.

Unlike Day-Lewis' poker-faced charmer, Dano's Eli Sunday is a fairly obvious fraud from the outset. His faith-healer act could hardly work on a crowd other than the barely literate rubes that make up his congregation. As a con man, he never comes close to equaling Plainview; but what Plainview recognizes, to a greater depth than Sunday ever grasps, is the necessity of forging a relationship with the local preacher in order to maintain a hold on his flock. Day-Lewis seethes with frustrated hatred whenever he shares the screen with Dano, but Plainview is too pragmatic a man to undermine his own status by indulging his obviously murderous whims.

The credits read "Inspired by" Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, and Anderson virtually shrugs off the author's social-crusader imperatives. The seams begin to show when you consider Day-Lewis and Dano as an allegory for the entwined concerns of capitalism and religion. Any conclusion drawn on those grounds is little more than shallow sloganeering, and it's far more effective when viewed as the saga of two people manipulating that relationship.

The most telling change as far as Anderson's take on the novel is the substitution of the book's expository title with the promise of an even more vital fluid. It hangs over the entire film in conjunction with Johnny Greenwood's remarkable score, which never underlines the onscreen action but engages with the images with the benefit of hindsight — creating an elegiac symphony that holds the same promise of disaster as the title.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

A Paramount Vantage release

 

All reader comments are subject to our Terms of Use. By clicking Post Comment, you acknowledge that you have reviewed and agree to these Terms.

Name	please enter your name
Email (will not be published)	please enter a valid email
Comment	please enter a comment
Enter the security code on the right in the textbox below.
Security Code	please enter the code
	Join the City Paper Mailing List

Preach for the Stars
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem
Repertory Film