Many minutes pass in There Will Be Blood, the latest film by writer-director Paul Anderson (Punch-DrunkLove, Boogie Nights), before human speech is heard. Set at the turn of the previous century in the early days of oil exploration, the film shows grimy prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) climbing from dark shafts into the blinding desert sunlight. The landscape covering the oceans of oil is inhospitable and the work done on the face of the land is the bleak, strenuous toil of hard men wrestling with the cast iron machinery and implements of their age.
There Will Be Blood is based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! and one wonders whether the original title might not have been better than something that sounds like a double-bill with Saw III at the discount house. Oil, after all, is on everyone’s mind these days, and the movie shows one story from the period when the world was nudging away from reliance on one fossil fuel, coal, toward dependence on another. Sinclair was a writer with a social and political point to make while investing his novels with striking characters and a strong sense of the dirty atmosphere of the Industrial Age.
In that sense Anderson is true to the author’s intention. Plainview is a determined American maverick and a bad man who will manipulate those around him and even kill, measuring his evil deeds according to his own objectives. That Plainview’s opponents happen to be representatives of the Standard Oil monopoly, proffering bland bonhomie, and a psychotic local religious leader, who thinks he is God’s prophet, sets a tone of resignation. Maybe Plainview has a point when he admits, “I look at people and see nothing worth liking.”
The one person Plainview has any attachment to his son, whom he calls by the businesslike moniker H.W. As a baby, the boy was at Plainview’s side when he struck his first gusher and was anointed by his father with a mark of black oil on the forehead. Plainview places H.W. as a prop at his side as he courts investors, calling himself “a family man.” His son is another tool but one gilded in gold. Plainview’s parenting skills may be doubtful, yet his emotional attachment to the boy is real. Striding with a rooster’s gait and eyes set in calm determination, Plainview is a man whose poker face reveals little. Although he was raised in Wisconsin, he speaks in lapidary, well-rounded vowels, as if he polished his speech in the home of an East Coast Brahmin. Plainview also possesses a keen sense of rhetoric sharpened with a hint of menace. To the rustic boy who demands money for a tip on a remote stretch of ranch land where oil might be found, he says: “If I travel all the way out there and find you’ve been lying to me, I’m going to take back more than the money I gave you.”
Day-Lewis’ performance is unforgettable. He has moments of competition from Paul Dano, the gawky young prophet of the Church of the Third Revelation. Roaming the stage of his rude clapboard church, he has convinced the locals, who feel remote and put-upon by forces beyond their grasp, that he is the “third revelation” with the power to consign the unfaithful to hell. He fancies himself as “the vessel of the Holy Spirit” but in his trances he more closely resembles the victim of demonic possession. Words aren’t wasted in the society Plainview inhabits; conversations tend to be sparse against the wind stirring the prairie, the clatter and rumble of passing trains and the deep groan of the earth, violated by the prospector’s drill shafts. It’s a dark, kerosene-lit world of little hope, vividly imagined in one of 2007's finest films. The chamber music score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood paints the petroleum frontier in alien hues suggested by the music from the prehistoric sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Anderson also seems influenced by Stanley Kubrick, observing his scenario with a cool sense of distance. The camera is an eye that sees all, tolerates everything and approves of nothing, like a god that has left the world to its own devices.
