Paul Thomas Anderson's stunning American epic of ego and greed

Paul Thomas Anderson is a formidably talented filmmaker whose every new work is an event to be awaited eagerly. Everything he has done is original and strong and passionate. Some think Boogie Nights was his masterpiece, Magnolia overly ambitious, Punch Drunk Love a minor work. In fact, including the classically concise Hard Eight, all his movies are uniquely interesting illustrations of his gifts. After a pause of five years, There Will Be Blood shows him rejuvenated and shooting for the stars, with a film of huge ambition about a hugely ambitious man. This one, not without the flaws of that ambition, has a larger set of themes and a deeper resonance.

Using as a starting point Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! but deriving his hero also from Von Stroheim’s silent classic, Greed, based on Frank Norris' novel, McTeague, Anderson has made an epic set in the first quarter of the twentieth century about one overweening and titanically determined individual whose life is dominated, whether he chooses or not, by America’s two great obsessions: money and religion.

The scarily intense actor Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Daniel Plainview, a self-made millionaire who gets rich as an oilman so he can put distance between himself and people, the majority of whom he hates with a ferocity equaling his ambition. His enemy/doppelganger/nemesis is Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) a young healer/preacher who draws his congregation from the inhabitants of Plainview’s oil drilling land. Mysteriously, Sunday’s identical brother Paul (also Dano) is the one who shows up early on and persuades Plainview to pay him a tidy sum to know where his family’s land is, because there is a lot of oil boiling up on it. This leads to the series of claims and land-grabs that occupy the rest of the story.

Plainview has no clear origins. The ultimate self-made man, he emerges from the soil like some primordial creature. We first see him digging for silver, going down into the bowels of the earth and eating dinner crouched like a primate in the opening segment of Kubrick’s 2001, which Anderson’s haunting prologue, with its wonderful use of the music by Jonny Greenwood that flows through the whole film, unmistakably evokes. The film will suggest and draw on many other sources, Stevens’ Giant, shot like this near Marfa, Texas, Welles’ Citizen Kane, John Huston and his classic film of B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; and others. An electrical tone dominates the air as if the whole landscape were alive with some terrible unknown power--the power to be exploited, dominated, but a power that can backfire and destroy its exploiters. Plainview’s relation is with the land, to take its riches and make himself rich. People are to be dealt with and told whatever story convinces them to do what he needs. He is a character so cold and inhuman and intense in his relationship with money that he is ready for one of the deepest bolgias of Dante’s Inferno, and sometimes he already seems to be there. Early on, the hero crawls out of the hole he’s dug badly injured, sliding along the ground like the damaged mountain climber in the documentary, Touching the Void. It’s as if he’s been into Hell and come out for a spell, to strut and walk upon P.T. Anderson’s stage.

The movie’s epic battle is, in a sense, a false one: it’s not between God and Mamon, but between Mamon and a tainted, ersatz God, because Eli Sunday is a charlatan, a mountebank. Dano’s church scenes are theatrical and absurd but convincing. Anderson is "great with actors," which means letting them open up to their fullest potential and taking risks with them. Dano is a risk, and himself takes risks. Day-Lewis chews up the landscape, mouthing and intoning his every line in what seems an evocation of Huston as Noah Cross in Polanski’s Chinatown. He is extreme, but his conviction is so great that he convinces. Even if he didn’t, he would be fun to watch from first to last. Life in the old West is life on another, alternate planet where people could and did make their own rules; Anderson’s actors make theirs. Strangely, as much as Plainview hates people, he allows himself to be humiliated, when it is necessary to serve his aims. And this is where Eli Sunday comes in.

Though the mood of mystery and potentially of There Will Be Blood is long sustained, Anderson has some history of having trouble with endings and has sometimes resorted to desperate measures to conclude with drama, most notably the plague of frogs in Magnolia. That is a biblical tale, and the Bible is another source: Daniel Plainview is like some Old Testament prophet raining down destruction and reaping gold. In the finale of this film, Anderson relies heavily on Dano, a young and relatively inexperienced actor. Dano is strange and powerful, but somehow as an adversary he seems inadequate, as does the final confrontation between the two men. There is nothing like the magisterial ominousness of the movie’s introduction, but that is such a remarkable achievement that it resonates long in the mind. No other movie this year so grips you and holds you riveted in its spell as this one.

And all the way through there are wonderful scenes, mostly out of doors and around oil wells. There are Plainview’s tense, teeming meetings with people whose land he wants or cooperation he needs to stake out new claims. The burning geyser is most notable, a sequence whose exact composition and flowing camera movement doesn’t keep it from having singular urgency. The man goes around with an innocent-faced boy called H.W. (Dillon Freasier) he has raised from a baby, lacing his bottle with whisky. H.W. stands silently by in Plainfield’s public appearances to make him look like a family man; but there is no wife. Later there is a mysterious man (Kevin J. O'Connor) who appears saying he’s the oilman’s half brother. When both these relationships deteriorate, horribly, Plainview is finally alone with his adversaries.

It’s been accurately said that There Will Be Blood is both an epic and a miniature. In contrast to the multivalent, polymorphous Boogie Nights and the multi-voiced Magnolia, this is a story in which one figure dominates, and tends to destroy those around him. It’s a terrible picture of the rapacious nature of capitalism and the isolating power of avarice. My reference to Dante’s Hell wasn’t casual, because Anderson’s Plainview truly qualifies as one of Dante’s most eternally damned, frozen in an isolation of self-interest, sacrificing even the most basic human ties. As enigmatic as Welle’s Charles Foster Kane, we watch him with fear of what he may do next. He seems to simultaneously declaim and chew his words, as if he wants to spew them out but then bites them back, and thus Day-Lewis draws attention to his every utterance but also gives consistency to a character who otherwise isn’t predictable. Strangest of all, for somebody who’s such a hostile egomaniac, you wouldn’t expect him so often to speak polite, cajoling words. "I don’t like to explain myself" however is the truest thing he says. Anderson has given us a treasure to ponder over and explain if we can.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.