Hey! There Was Blood!

It's almost impossible for me to be objective when it comes to Paul Thomas Anderson. Punch Drunk Love is one of my favorite movies of all time. I fucking LOVED the plague of frogs and the full-cast Aimee Mann karaoke in Magnolia. And those were two movies that disappointed critics. His newest “greatest movie of all time” (and P.T. really doesn’t seem capable of operating under lesser terms), There Will Be Blood is only his second in 8 years. Only this time, it actually is being touted as a “masterpiece,” not divisively, like his past films, but nearly universally. In fact, the only part of the film that seems to give any reservations, is the end of the film – a big, bombastic showdown between Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis), the film’s oil-drilling protagonist and Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), Plainview’s antagonist – the Western town’s precocious prophet. Both megalomaniacs, mirroring each other, and anchoring the film’s American thematic story line of profits vs. prophets.

I’ve been looking forward to this film since I read an early draft of the script almost 3 years ago. (By the way, let me advise against ever reading the script of a movie you want to see ahead of time. So much worse than reading a book before its cinematic adaptation, the script tells you almost everything that’s going to happen. It’s the ultimate spoiler.) When I read the script, I was a little disappointed, and a little skeptical. There Will Be Blood had none of the magic realism that wowed in Magnolia or Punch Drunk Love. It didn’t have the lightness or excitement that made Boogie Nights so enjoyable. It was a little too much Citizen Kane, or perhaps The Godfather trilogy – an epic about a man who will stop at nothing in his dogged pursuit of wealth and power in the perpetual competition that is the American Dream. But I had faith, and more than a little curiosity. In Anderson’s hands, with Robert Elswit at the lens, Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood composing the score, and Daniel Day-Lewis controlling the screen, I had faith that There Will Be Blood would feel familiar in only the most basic sense of the epic American film.

I wasn’t exactly right. The film did feel, in many ways, like a rehashing of what Orson Welles practically turned trope with one film. That’s not to say Anderson’s epic, masterpiece or no, wasn’t stunning. It was. And at almost two hours and forty-five minutes, it felt faster than some ninety-minute films I’ve seen. From the opening title, as Plainview mines for silver in abject solitude with nothing but Greenwood’s discordant strings saturating the tension, until the final prophetic line of the film, I was on the edge of my seat, rapt from the spectacle of this turn of the century Western. Most importantly, I would see it again in a heartbeat, confident that its richness and even its audacity would not be distilled.

The story, loosely based on the John Updike novel "Oil!," follows Daniel Plainview, a man incapable of seeing beyond the pursuit of wealth, who goes from mining silver to drilling oil during California’s oil rush at the onset of the 20th century. He uses his adopted son, H.W., to portray himself as a family man in an effort to buy land from lowly Western settlers who neither know the value of the land they sit on, nor how they might tap the wealth beneath their feet. Plainview’s perspective on “family” is debatable. His son is his partner, and a cute face to help him sway sellers. However, it seems evident that Plainview does genuinely care for his boy, and for about the first half of the film, he is quite likeable. But his competitiveness, and his hatred for mankind, rise to the surface and eventually explode like the oil from one of his derricks. In a moment of revelation, one of very few, Plainview tells his brother, who appears out of the woodwork when he hears of Plainview’s success, “I have a competition in me that wants no one else to succeed…I hate most people. I look at them and I can’t see anything worth liking.”
Daniel Day Lewis’s performance is one of the most terrifying and stunning performances you’re likely to see for some time. It’s a tour-de-force that, for my money, is scarier even than Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men, perhaps because Chigurh is not a man, but a killer, a psychopath. He’s the boogieman in the closet, the monster under the bed. Daniel Plainview is a product of the American Dream, a man so driven by greed and competition that he has no room left for any other emotion. Day Lewis treats the character with such intensity that, accompanied by Greenwood’s score and Elswit’s frame, my heart was practically trying to escape the prison of my ribs.

All the pieces come together at their most sublime when an oil well explodes in flames, injuring Plainview’s son. The monolith of fire and oil is the centerpiece of the film, violent and beautiful, and the very kind of cinematic bravado with which Anderson excels. The fiery tower illuminates the barren landscape through the night, silhouetting Plainview who watches in subdued ecstasy while his son suffers in the mess hall. It may be the finest single scene of the year. Certainly, the most spectacular.

While paling in the brilliance of Day Lewis’s Plainview, and who wouldn’t, Paul Dano takes a big step from his role as the angsty teenager in Little Miss Sunshine, injecting Eli Sunday with a certain smarmy pomposity that actually seems to make him more despicable than his terrifying counterpart. Still, I can’t help but wonder if another actor wouldn’t have been able to take that character a little further. Dano wasn’t always convincing as the town’s bombastic spiritual leader, nor did he seem vile enough to illicit Plainview’s murderous ire, but I’m hard pressed to think of an alternative. There just aren’t many (any?) strong enough actors for this role that can play a 15 year-old, or, as I’m sure Anderson would have preferred, someone even younger. Rumor has it, though, that Dano was the second choice. The first actor cast in the role of Eli Sunday was literally scared away by Daniel Day Lewis’s legendary on and off set intensity. And so Dano was cast. And he really did do a fine job.

The most divisive moment of the film is the final scene set in a private bowling alley, decried as over-the-top, and even as the moment, where, according to David Denby, "some part of [Anderson] must have rebelled against canonization." Um, OK. Well, Denby writes for the New Yorker so I’m not about suck down any of his condescension. What has he ever done with his life that’s so great? But I can see how the explosive finale, which is in parts disturbing and hilarious, would turn off some viewers. While the entire movie basked in the expanses and loneliness of the old West, the big finale, propelled by alcohol and self-destruction, takes place in a small private underground bowling alley. It’s like any number of Anderson’s greatest scenes but it’s injected here, at the end of a film that has, for two and a half hours, eschewed humor, lightness, for that matter, a film that has reserved itself in a relative stoicism, a patient drilling into the ground, into, if you will, a heart of darkness. I don’t want to give away anything from the scene, but I think this is when the well exploded. And when that happens, you can’t blame it for getting a little messy.

There Will Be Blood was a definite departure from P.T. Anderson’s past work. For that matter, it was a departure from that magical excess that made me love Anderson in the first place. There’s no denying that it is a masterful piece, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a piece that only Anderson could have made. That is, I think, where the film falls short. From its conception, this film was geared up to be a masterpiece, a great American epic. Ultimately, it became so self-aware that it risked feeling formulaic. I think that’s why I enjoyed the final scene so much. That seemed like the one move that was undeniably Anderson’s, the one scene that no other director could have pulled off. And it will be argued for years, I’m sure, whether or not Anderson did. The quality of this film, however, really does seem to surpass any debate. It, in itself, is a stunning fiery tower, and a film to be reckoned with, like it or not.