Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie is called There Will Be Blood. It delivers on that threat late in the movie, in a manner that would seem weird, eccentric, and just too much — if the two hours that preceded it were not also weird, eccentric, and wildly ambitious. The writer-director of Boogie Nights and Magnolia cannot be said to lack ambition, and with his fifth effort he teeters on the brink of hubris.
He’s not merely playing with narrative conventions, he’s dragging us into a strange and original vision of the cinema. He has the gall to openly court comparisons to Citizen Kane. It’s only hubris if he fails, and P.T. Anderson has succeeded in making that rare thing nowadays: A Great American Movie.
Anderson has always had the advantage of excellent ensemble casts: Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, John C. Reilly, Philip Baker Hall. This time he has one actor, Daniel Day-Lewis, and that is all he needs. Day-Lewis has made a career of amazing performances, but in this film he is legend.
There Will Be Blood is based on the 1927 novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair. I’ve not read Sinclair, but there are at least two mythic American characters who come to mind while viewing this film: Charles Foster Kane, who was based on the media tycoon William Randolph Hearst (who, among other things, urged the US to annex the Philippines), and Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. These men embody the spirit that built America: the drive, the sheer force of will, the obsessive pursuit of the dream. The protagonist of Blood is similarly possessed, and he will chase his dream to its apocalyptic conclusion.
The first half-hour of the film announces that anyone who expects the usual Hollywood product should get up and leave. In a barren landscape on a blistering day, a lone prospector descends into a mineshaft.
He’s filthy, his dirt-encrusted hands scrabbling for chunks of rock streaked with silver. The ladder breaks; he lands at the bottom and breaks a leg. We can feel his agony and exhaustion as he hauls himself out of the pit. The traces of silver are sold for a few dollars while he lies stretched out on the floor. He signs his name on the receipt: Daniel Plainview.
Two years later, Plainview and his crew are drilling for oil. He’s still filthy; he’ll never be clean. The men labor in the sludge, looking less like humans than creatures from the black lagoon. No words are spoken in these opening passages: it is visual poetry, rendered by Anderson and cinematographer Robert Elswit. We hear the thud and clangor as the earth is scarred, pounded, blasted. The air vibrates with an eerie electronic wail composed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. It is the music of the future: beautiful and terrifying. A vein is gashed, the slime wells up: oil, the blood of our modern age. We are watching the birth of industry — not the glorious, self-congratulating propaganda, but the down-and-dirty version. It is thrilling, and men die for it.
A worker kisses a child and dies in an accident moments later. The child is brought up by the misanthropic Plainview, whose idea of fatherhood is to give the kid milk laced with whiskey. Eight years later, a mildly prosperous Plainview and his son H.W. (Dillon Freasier, who had never acted before) go around the country convincing landowners to lease their property for oil exploration. Plainview, in the guise of “plain speaking,” cows the common folk into handing over their land for less than it’s worth. He doesn’t use charm, but brutal economic logic and an appeal to the “family values” America holds dear. This is my son and partner, he announces, trundling out the boy. Plainview is a man with no past, only a future; he has no family, so he invents one. What vestigial tenderness there is in his character is bestowed on the boy, whom he also exploits. When he addresses the people, he sells them a vision of prosperity: schools, stores, towns. There Will Be Blood is an epic of capitalism, but Anderson does not regale us with panoramas of cities rising, or bustling offices full of plucky idealists. This epic is told by Plainview’s face, his bow-legged walk and increasingly unhinged behavior. The exhilaration of making money gives way to paranoia, loneliness, and violence. Did he become mad, or was he mad to begin with? Don’t all visionaries have a touch of madness?
Anderson sets up two opposing themes in his American epic: Industry and Religion, God and Mammon. As someone once put it, the Puritans left England because it was too liberal; they came to America to worship. A young man named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano, the silent Nietzsche-worshipping brother in Little Miss Sunshine) sells Plainview the information that their land is literally sitting on oil. There is a moment of confusion when we meet his twin, Eli, who believes that God speaks through him.
Eli builds the Church of the Third Revelation among the oilfields. Easy enough to see the fires on the oilfields as the fires of hell. At the services, he starts out speaking in a soft, humble voice that turns into a strangled cry of religious ecstasy. Is he possessed by the spirit, or is he a fraud? Eli stands against Plainview, and their competition escalates to a comical degree, but they’re the only people who can understand each other.
By the end of the movie the vast, open spaces teeming with possibility have shrunk into a bowling lane in the basement of Plainview’s mansion.
Sitting on the floor on the leg that never properly healed, munching on a cold steak, Plainview confronts a future he could not have envisioned decades earlier, while sitting on a broken leg at the bottom of a mineshaft. The dream has become a nightmare. He has ushered in a century of blood.
* * *
E-mail your comments and questions to emotionalweatherreport@gmail.com.
