The opening image of There Will Be Blood packs a wallop: a long, stately shot tracking a rough, distinctly American landscape. But it’s the accompanying audio that makes it all click. Both sublime and a little sickening, what we hear is a lost chord full of promise and queasy regrets, of almost subliminal shrieks and sighs that begin as a low rumble and rise steadily like the last note of A Day in the Life unraveling in reverse.
There Will Be Blood is the monumentally ambitious new opus from Paul Thomas Anderson, the young iconoclast responsible for Boogie Nights and Magnolia. The sonic experimentation (supplied by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood) is only the beginning of the movie’s audaciousness, but it’s as good an entry point into the film as any.
Music has always been crucial to Anderson’s movies, but here the director’s ingenious artistry appears to be all but effortless. And even without the benefit of the movie’s other elements, Greenwood’s score is huge, a mad mix of off-kilter majors and minors that lap at Aaron Copland’s ghostly hand to offer up a stirring, unsettling anthem for America’s future and past.
Loosely based on Uptown Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, Anderson’s two-and-a-half-hour epic is a collection of chilly scenes from the life of proto-capitalist Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a ruthlessly single-minded entrepreneur who makes a fortune raping the land during the early years of the 20th century. We watch Daniel progress from scrappy prospector of gold and silver, eventually finding his forte as a big-time oil man, and some of the movie’s most remarkable sequences simply detail Plainview and his ilk at work, clawing, smashing and otherwise forcing their way into the earth as they struggle to wrench every scrap of wealth from the ground.
It’s not always a pretty picture, but as captured by the camera of Anderson’s longtime cinematographer, Robert Elswit, the process takes on its own kind of dirty poetry. The film’s opening passages, filled with clumsy penetrations into Mother Earth and human faces smeared in oil and blood, are fabulously dark and wordless, unfolding for a full 16 minutes before the first word is even uttered. (That word, for what it’s worth, is “no.”)
The sequence culminates with Plainview stranded at the bottom of a mine, his body mangled in zealous pursuit of gold, torturously dragging himself up to the surface only to find himself alone in the blinding light of a desert. It’s the first of many what-profit-a-man-to-gain-the-world-if-he-loses-his-body/soul moments, inevitably recalling The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Greed, two similarly themed classics that There Will Be Blood references time and again.
It’s curious how so many of our best young filmmakers manage to feel like minimalists even when working in larger-than-life mode (Wes Anderson’s spiritual journey through India, The Darjeeling Limited, is just one recent example), and There Will Be Blood is a textbook example of how to pull off this particular trick. Despite the popular assumption that this is supposed to be some grand oil-empire epic á la Giant, Blood is essentially a spare, almost painfully introspective art film, more driven by details than narrative momentum or life-changing events.
As in Punch Drunk Love, Anderson often forgoes linearity or even logic for ellipses and odd little tangents, and though there are moments of heroic power here, there are also stretches that feel scattershot or clumsily confrontational, as if the director were more interested in breaking down walls than advancing his story.
There Will Be Blood often seems to be all detours as it shifts and slides from Daniel’s troubled relationship with a young boy he claims as his son (Dillon Freasier) to his dealings with a hypocritical man of God (Paul Dano) to the appearance of a mysterious stranger who may or may not be Daniel’s long-lost brother. Disguises and doppelgangers abound, accidents happen, everyone’s behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, and through it all, the nasty process of acquiring obscene amounts of money by any means necessary is meticulously documented.
Daniel Day-Lewis is on screen virtually every instant here, and although there’s a distractingly stylized aspect to his performance (his distinctive, clipped speech patterns are directly lifted from Sierra Madre director John Huston), the raw emotional power he brings to the role is astonishing, particularly in the film’s later sections.
Day-Lewis plays Plainview as supremely confident but intensely private, as if hiding vast reserves of pain or something uglier. A Charles Foster Kane-like bundle of contradictions, he can be pleasant, even charming, but there’s no getting around that place inside where a hatred burns for the rest of his species. “I have a competition in me,” says Plainview, the rugged individualist revealed as sociopath. “I don’t want no one else to succeed.”
Plainview eventually accomplishes his dream of making enough money to get away from all the people he loathes, and the final act of There Will Be Blood lurches ahead to a time when Daniel has let his inner recluse flower. A half-bonkers Kane by way of Howard Hughes, he rambles through his own private Shangri-la clad in dirty long johns and drowning in bourbon, taking bleary-eyed pot shots at the bric-a-brac filling his deserted dream house.
Plainview’s degeneration is powerful stuff, and the man’s self-destructive nature might even be read as Anderson’s allegory for the death wish of Western civilization itself. Still, even while being bowled over by the film’s utterly over-the-top finale, I kept thinking of another frontier businessman, Warren Beatty trudging through the dirty snow of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and wondering if Daniel Plainview’s antics significantly expand on Beatty’s simple muttering of the mantra “money and pain” over and over again.
I’m not prepared to say at this point, since Anderson’s dazzling, convoluted, obtuse and visionary movie is simply too big a meal to digest at one sitting. Still, I can’t wait to see There Will Be Blood again, if only to see where it leads next time.
This article appears in Jan 16-22, 2008.
