Paul Thomas Anderson has described his latest film There Will Be Blood as a boxing match between two forceful, driven men. One, a successful oil man (Daniel Day-Lewis) with his determined sights set on a small California town which has the (mis)fortune of sitting above an ocean of oil, and the other, Daniel’s nemesis, a local, self-ordained minister (Paul Dano) who wishes to use the profits of the discovery to advance his church’s influence outside his desolate town’s limits. Both men’s pummeling blows come one after the other, each blast weighing a heavy toll on the men until they are reduced to their shattered ideals and battered flesh. This film is the most powerful display of greed corroding men to their bilious cores that I have ever seen.
We initially meet oil prospector and driller Daniel Plainview (Mr. Lewis) deep within the earth, chomping away at the hard, cold ground with a dull pickaxe. He looks like a sinewy vampire driven to exhaustion by an unholy thirst for blood. But soon the oil is seeping from the ground like black blood from a deep puncture wound. Daniel’s thirst is quenched momentarily, but more is required. With the help of his angel faced son H.W., (Dillon Freasier) which Daniel adopts for the purpose of making him seeming more like a “family man”, Daniel snatches up a farm in a shabby town called Little Boston, where nothing grows and oil collects in puddles on the ground.
Besides oil, Little Boston is home the feverish Reverend Eli Sunday (Mr. Dano) and his wild dreams of salvation through suffering and magical healing through prayer. Eli’s faith in God is only rivaled by Daniel’s faith in Capitalism and the two butt heads savagely, laying waste to the town and, ultimately, to each other.
The pace to the film is slow and deliberate. Each shot looks painstakingly assembled and it is obvious everyone involved with the production was operating at the top of their game. The unhurried shots echo Terrence Malick’s pastoral film Days of Heaven but only much darker and foreboding. Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s score adds much to the ominous tone, rattling and clanging like an overburdened oil rig one moment and the next evoking a blissfully eerie symphony.
Daniel Day-Lewis fully inhabits the role of Daniel Plainview, an entrepreneur of singular vision who will not detour his desires for any man or any god. As Plainview, Mr. Day-Lewis doesn’t chew scenery, he obliterates it. When he is on screen it is almost impossible to look away (which is a shame, because each shot is so luscious). His characters vitriolic loathing of mankind is so venomous it almost seeps through the screen. The fire burning in his eyes when one of his oil rigs explodes is not a reflection of the spurting flames around him, it’s a raging firestorm within him scorching to the surface. It is indeed a powerful performance and one that has continued to give me shivers days after seeing the film.
We initially meet oil prospector and driller Daniel Plainview (Mr. Lewis) deep within the earth, chomping away at the hard, cold ground with a dull pickaxe. He looks like a sinewy vampire driven to exhaustion by an unholy thirst for blood. But soon the oil is seeping from the ground like black blood from a deep puncture wound. Daniel’s thirst is quenched momentarily, but more is required. With the help of his angel faced son H.W., (Dillon Freasier) which Daniel adopts for the purpose of making him seeming more like a “family man”, Daniel snatches up a farm in a shabby town called Little Boston, where nothing grows and oil collects in puddles on the ground.
Besides oil, Little Boston is home the feverish Reverend Eli Sunday (Mr. Dano) and his wild dreams of salvation through suffering and magical healing through prayer. Eli’s faith in God is only rivaled by Daniel’s faith in Capitalism and the two butt heads savagely, laying waste to the town and, ultimately, to each other.
The pace to the film is slow and deliberate. Each shot looks painstakingly assembled and it is obvious everyone involved with the production was operating at the top of their game. The unhurried shots echo Terrence Malick’s pastoral film Days of Heaven but only much darker and foreboding. Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s score adds much to the ominous tone, rattling and clanging like an overburdened oil rig one moment and the next evoking a blissfully eerie symphony.
Daniel Day-Lewis fully inhabits the role of Daniel Plainview, an entrepreneur of singular vision who will not detour his desires for any man or any god. As Plainview, Mr. Day-Lewis doesn’t chew scenery, he obliterates it. When he is on screen it is almost impossible to look away (which is a shame, because each shot is so luscious). His characters vitriolic loathing of mankind is so venomous it almost seeps through the screen. The fire burning in his eyes when one of his oil rigs explodes is not a reflection of the spurting flames around him, it’s a raging firestorm within him scorching to the surface. It is indeed a powerful performance and one that has continued to give me shivers days after seeing the film.
The only (minor) criticism I can muster is that the film is not at all subtle. That is not to say it is a “message movie”. There are no rousing speeches or lectures or anything as blatant as that. However, it is about God and Money battling it out as personified by two larger then life men who are both stubborn and troubled and totally alone in the harsh, filthy world. And unlike No Country for Old Men, which this movie is being pitted against by most critics for best picture of the year (unfairly for both films), there is no ambiguity, which No Country was chock full of. At the end of There Will Be Blood, there promise in the title is realized and there is no doubt who the victor is.
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