1 Daniel Day Lewis as oil baron Daniel Plainview in P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood
Sublime wallowing in America's oil fields
P.T. Anderson and Daniel Day Lewis wow audiences with There Will Be Blood
By Beth Capper
Published: January 17th, 2008 | 11:53am
Brutality, selfishness, savagery, violence. The last six months has been marked by three films obsessed with these issues, each directed by an auteur representing a different generation of American filmmaking. There's veteran director Sidney Lumet's twisted family drama Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, the Coen Brothers’ startling adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, and now Paul Thomas Anderson — a relative newcomer to the game — comes out swinging after a five-year hiatus with the incendiary There Will Be Blood.
Paul Thomas Anderson is one of those Hollywood directors that cult and indie audiences have a lot of love for. Taking Robert Altman as his key reference point, Anderson's most celebrated films are praised for their slick lascivious cinematography as well as their less accessible penchant for complex human relationships and characters mired in self-reflection.
There Will Be Blood is not a departure from the epic structure Anderson has utilized so faithfully in his most notable films (Magnolia,Boogie Nights) — the film spans more than two and a half hours, but it takes its leave from the exploratory humanism of his past movies. In Magnolia, Anderson spent more than three hours dissecting the complexity of the human condition, finding good and bad in everyone. There Will be Blood almost entirely abandons this faith in the human condition, painting a chaotic, violent, and sometimes senseless picture of humanity.
The film loosely adapts Upton Sinclair's novella Oil! and centers on Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis), a silver prospector turned oil baron who gets a tip about some unchartered mining territory in rural California. Plainview arrives in California with full intent to rip off the hicks that live in the area, but Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a young but extremely powerful minister in the local Baptist Church, sees through Plainview's mercenary ways. Spanning a period of almost 30 years, we see Plainview turn from idealistic entrepreneur to an insane misanthrope holed up in a crumbling grandiose mansion, with only his money to love.
There Will Be Blood is both a powerful personal drama about two men and a political allegory about America's preoccupation with oil and religion. The scene in the film that most eloquently and powerfully captures this is when Plainview — who despises religion — has to go in front of a full church congregation and repent his sins at the behest of Sunday so he may procure some land he vitally wants to drill. Sunday's attempts to humiliate him perfectly illustrate the lengths someone will leap for power and wealth.
The result is a dazzling feast for the eyes and ears, scoring sparse desert wastelands with Johnny Greenwood's (Radiohead) primal techno concertos. There Will Be Blood, through Daniel Plainview's crippled glory, encapsulates both a lament and a gross celebration of 21st century greed and nihilism.
Issue #35
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