There Will Be Blood by
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There Will Be Blood really shouldn't work. It's a long film, perhaps unnecessarily so considering it has little story, an unorthodox structure and not one single talking role for a woman. It's based on a book, Upton Sinclair's 1927 black gold expose Oil!, but chooses to use only a fraction of its source. And, after nearly three hours of serious, epic cinema, it ends with Daniel Day-Lewis bellowing about drinking other people's milkshakes in a scene that is sure to get Ronald McDonald pondering the best way to capture Mr Method in gelatinised flavour form. Yep, There Will Be Blood should be the biggest disaster of auterism gone mad since Michael Cimino almost brought United Artists to its knees with Heaven’s Gate in 1980. And yet...
And yet, with only his fifth feature, Magnolia director Paul Thomas Anderson has created a potential masterpiece. A shoe-in for a place in the top five films of the year (yes, even at this early stage) and a contender for one of the films of the decade, There Will Be Blood is a Citizen Kane for the modern generation, an epic tale of greed, religion and family which charts the birth of the world's most powerful nation from the oilfields of the frontier lands to (on an allegorical level at least) the modern world, without ever seeming trite or obvious. In fact, There Will Be Blood is anything but these things. It's mysterious, abstract, difficult at times to understand or penetrate. And it begins with box-office poison: twenty minutes of dialogue-free footage.
Hidden beneath the dark recesses of cinematographer Robert Elswitt’s beautifully barren frontier hills, we are first introduced to prospector Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) in these silent opening scenes. With remarkable economy of storytelling, Anderson cuts through the years, from 1898 through to 1911, charting Plainview's ascent from a humble silver miner who inadvertently strikes to oil to his birth as a businessman. All in complete silence. Its wordlessness is certainly striking, the work of a director brimming with confidence (if not arrogance), but it serves a purpose, allowing Anderson to strip back worthless exposition and tell us everything we need to know about Plainview. Which is to say, he tells us precisely nothing.
If Anderson's previous films were about connection and understanding the characters, There Will Be Blood is about quite the opposite. Plainview begins the film as an obsessive searching for his fortune and ends it as an obsessive searching for greater fortune. He doesn’t learn anything and certainly doesn’t repent. He isn’t a man you can hope to know, or even to understand, and Anderson does all he can to muddy the waters. We are told he has a son, HW (Dillain Frasier), who Plainview claims as his own, but appears to be adopted from one of his late colleagues. He has a brother, Henry, who mysteriously appears mid-way through the film and then exits to similar confusion, but we hear little else about his family. He had a wife who "died during childbirth", but this is a man so vile, so misanthropic, so hateful towards his fellow man that it's hard to see him liking a woman, never mind loving her.
Day-Lewis does nothing to make things any clearer. Taking Gangs of New York’s Bill The Butcher and adding even more theatricality, the actor plays Plainview as an actor, a business-obsessed chameleon, switching one persona for another in a bid to appeal to the whims of whichever small-town community he is hoping to rob of its oil. Want a family man? You got it. Want a religious man? You betcha. Hell, if he found oil in a feminist community he’d probably don a wig and rename himself Dorothy. But a man he remains and once he has wormed his way in, he does all he can to assert his masculine authority over Little Boston, affecting the deep drawl, the larger-than-life mannerisms and long, drawn-out stares that have now become iconic. Some will say it veers into panto, but this is one of the performances of Day Lewis's career, and you‘ll leave the cinema quivering at its realism.
It’s quite amazing then that opposite this tornado his opponent for control of the oil is not only a match, but a genuine rival. Angelic of face and small of stature, Paul Dano seems all wrong for the role of Eli Sunday, the evangelic preacher who lures Plainview to Little Boston so he can get the oil to feed his church. But there's a quiet confidence to the Little Miss Sunshine star. While Plainview is all about the physical, Sunday is the mental, Dano quietly espousing the arrogance of a man who knows he has claimed the hearts and minds of the townspeople in a far deeper way than Plainview ever could. Of course, Plainview doesn't settle for that, and the two play out a battle of wits across the film, coming to physical and emotion blows on three occasions. In the first, Plainview violently humiliates Eli, in the second the tables are turned and Eli gets his own back, and in the third Anderson boldly and brilliantly descends into Kubrickian absurdity with that already infamous milkshake line.
Indeed, if There Will Be Blood is channelling any one director (and this is certainly Anderson’s least ‘influenced by’ film), it's Kubrick and, more specifically, his sense of foreboding. Driven by Jonny Greenwood's ominous score - which both he and Anderson have admitted was influenced by the music for The Shining - the opening scenes have Kubrick’s unshakable sense of foreboding, the majesty of classically Western mountains undermined by Greenwood's buzzing violins. It’s an astonishing piece of work (bafflingly overlooked by the Academy on a technicality) and it hardly lets up from then on in. When Plainview accidentally strikes oil later in these scenes, Greenwood‘s music could well be reflecting the birth of Dracula or Frankenstein rather than an obscenely rich businessman, and when the Little Boston well finally comes through unexpectedly Greenwood lends it an edge, an excitement and a sense of doom which is quite unlike anything this critic has ever witnessed in the cinema before.
As for Anderson, this is the mark of a film-maker evolving. While his fellow 90s Movie Brats have fallen by the wayside, slipped into repetition (Wes Anderson), banality (Kevin Smith) or ego (Quentin Tarantino), Anderson has challenged himself over and over again, scrapping the epic length and Altman-esque plots of Boogie Nights and Magnolia in Punch-Drunk Love, and doing away with the extravagant camerawork he has become synonymous with here. Instead, TWBB‘s camerawork is simple and unimposing. When Plainview reunites with HW, for example, Anderson shoots the scene in extreme long-shot, handing it an unsettling tone. When Plainview tries to intimidate someone shortly after, we see him from inside the house, threateningly riding by on his horse, like a monster searching for a weakness. And during the scenes of confrontation between characters, Anderson holds the shots on his actors a little longer than he needs to, the camera drinking in every bit of menace seeping from Day-Lewis’s face.
It's because of this that critics have been keen to praise the film, some even going so far as to hail it as a cinematic revolution. We’re not too sure. After just one viewing, it's difficult to judge the film beyond its potential inclusion on end of the year lists and place in the context of this decade. There Will Be Blood simply isn’t a film which you can’t properly process with just one viewing, and for that reason we won’t get too excited. But what we do know is that Anderson has created something that feels new. He has taken a genre almost as old as the medium it is a part of, mixed it with period drama, political comment and bizarre black comedy and come up with something as indescribable as it is intoxicating. A western horror? An avant garde period film? A funny Daniel Day-Lewis flick? Whatever it is, There Will Be Blood really shouldn’t work. But, somehow, magnificently, it does.
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