A friend asked me about writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s bold oil-boom epic There Will Be Blood not too long ago, having not seen it in theaters, and I explained to him that I found myself in the somewhat difficult and unusual position of having to stand in principled opposition to the cineaste-class who’ve declared it a top-shelf classic right out of the gate, while at the same time having to defend the movie against its most ardent detractors. The truth about the movie, as with much of life, is that it’s somewhere in the middle, between the poles of the most fervently staked out positions.
Anderson has never been one to play it safe. Whereas plenty of indie directors
gladly cede to a bit of formula for the security and financing of a regular studio shingle,
Anderson’s films have almost gotten progressively more idiosyncratic
and left-of-center, and that trend continues with his fifth feature, one of the more critically praised films of last year. Whatever one thinks of it, there isn’t any legitimate way to characterize There Will Be Blood except as a striking work, and almost inarguably by someone of great, innate
virtuosity. Even for a filmmaker who has reveled in the heyday of the
San Fernando Valley porn boom (Boogie Nights), made it rain frogs (Magnolia) and centered a story of emotional constipation and romantic bloom partially around pudding rebates (Punch-Drunk Love),
this is an audacious movie. It’s also a polarizing, punishing work, and to my mind one that is at least somewhat backwards-plotted, with a foreboding title and forestalled conflict working to give lent importance to an otherwise sketchily defined narrative proper.
Using the basic narrative template of Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel “Oil!” as a jumping-off point, There Will Be Blood
unfolds over the course of a couple decades, against the provocative
and combustible frontier of California’s turn-of-the-20th-century
petroleum boom. The story chronicles the life and times of Daniel
Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis),
a straight-talking but paranoid and amoral would-be businessman who
transforms himself from a down-and-out silver miner into a self-made,
independent oil tycoon. A brutal mineshaft accident busts open his nose and fractures
his leg, but gives Plainview a small stake from which to start — as well as an adopted son, the offspring of a coworker who doesn’t survive.
When Plainview
taps an underground vein, more money follows. Then Plainview gets a mysterious tip
from a strange passerby, Paul Sunday (Little Miss Sunshine‘s Paul Dano), that there’s a little town out west where oil is literally oozing right
up out of the ground. Sensing opportunity, Plainview sets out with his
right-hand man, Fletcher Hamilton (Ciaran Hinds, above right), and young son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier),
to take their chances in dusty Little Boston, a hardscrabble community
where the main excitement comes from the holy-roller church of
charismatic preacher Eli (Dano again), Paul’s pious twin brother.
Plainview has a knack for saying the things that he knows people
like to hear, talking about the schools, fresh bread and milk, and
other goods and services that Little Boston will accrue as a result of
their collective acquiescence for his development. An opportunist
himself, meanwhile, Eli wants assurances that his church will see its
proper share of the profits from the drilling. The rest of the film finds Plainview growing his business and grappling
with three major personal conundrums and crises — the sudden arrival of
a long-lost half-brother, Henry (Kevin J. O’Connor),
an oil well accident that robs H.W. of his hearing, and
a continued, quiet clash of wills with Eli. As the oil wells raise
Plainview’s fortunes along with those of all around him, these
conflicts slowly rise, and the values of faith, community, hard
work and ambition are imperiled by the corruption and deception born of this “black gold.”
From its purposefully threatening title on down to the gleeful nastiness with which Plainview is imbued, There Will Be Blood
feels like the first work in which Anderson has come fully to peace
with the notion of evil in the world, or at least human wickedness and
wanton destruction. Plainview is, to put it politely, a real
son-of-a-bitch, and a man whose heart hardens further with each dollar
he earns. Anderson’s screenplay easily, and deservedly, draws comparisons to The Treasure of Sierra Madre and Citizen Kane,
both by way of its setting and themes — the wild, every-man-for-himself
western edge of the early 20th century, and the manner in which the
movie assays masculinized competition and cresting paranoia. What
Anderson expertly conveys is a deceptive sense of epic scope. We
scarcely leave Planeview’s side, but, thanks to some economically
condensed head-butting with peers, paradoxically have a keen sense of
his place in the oil industry, and the industry’s burgeoning importance
to the country at large.
Similarly, There Will Be Blood’s engaging and effective
evocation of early film history, and silent film in particular, is
purposeful, willful — from the emphasis placed on cinematographer
Robert Elswit’s gorgeous, justly lauded images to the focus on an
isolated, increasingly paranoid central figure. Meanwhile, besting even Michael Mann’s Ali — which opened under the pleading, almost
mournful strains of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home To Me,” for seven
wordless minutes — Anderson’s movie opens with a 14-minute passage in
which no dialogue is spoken.
“And yet,” it must be said, followed by ellipses. For all its superlative production design and exacting sense of order and construction, There Will Be Blood also suffers a bit from a feeling of stifling self-consciousness.
The
film holds one’s attention, but it also feels both airless and maybe just a little self-satisfied,
never more so than in its finale, which (over)reaches for profundity
via an act of arbitrary violence. To call the movie an intellectual
sham would be an overstatement, but
there is a same-note, single-dimensionality to There Will Be Blood,
an anemia aped by Radiohead guitarist’s Jonny Greenwood’s memorable score for the
film — a THX test of nervous string work (particularly the track “Henry
Plainview”) that, somewhat like the story as a whole, comes across as
an elongated act of precious deception.
Plainview and Eli circle one another — not really enemies per se,
but barely swallowed discontent bubbling in each of them — yet little
changes for either man. The audience watches, meanwhile, but doesn’t
deeply identify with either man, particularly once the film awkwardly ducks
forward in time to 1927, when Plainview’s obsessive bitterness and
mistrust has calcified into performance-art-level theatricality, no
matter Day-Lewis’ mesmeric charm. The film could be read partially as an
allegory of false prophets — of preacher-politician-authority figures
who slyly trade in falsehoods, or talk out of one side of their mouth
while lining their coffers with private gain. But the character of Eli,
as well as Plainview’s conflict with him, isn’t really deeply sketched
out enough to support a sustained vindication of this reading. There Will Be Blood is, it seems — first, foremost and
achingly so — a movie for cineastes, with less of a realized arc than
an ending simply designed to be written about. There are far greater sins, of
course, but this eminence front rings of false modesty… or perhaps just
a savvy bit of financial capital raising, after all.
Housed in a cardboard cover, the two-disc collector’s edition version of There Will Be Blood comes presented in its original 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio, along with a superlative Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound mix, available in English, French and Spanish (all with optional subtitles). A text excerpt from Oil! nicely graces the set’s gate-fold packaging, but doesn’t augur well for the rest of the supplemental bonus material, all of which is housed on the second disc. Along with the cursory inclusions of the movie’s teaser and theatrical trailer, there are two unprocessed deleted scenes and a dailies reel, the latter featuring an alternate take of the explosive restaurant scene between Plainview and other oilmen. All of these, in aggregate, run about just under a dozen minutes.
Eschewing the sort of audio commentary offerings that made the Boogie Nights DVD such a treat, there is instead a silent 15-minute montage of scenes and historical photographs that served as inspiration for Anderson in his crafting of the story. These is interesting, but, absent further contextual discussion, eventually becomes tedious. The only other inclusion, The Story of Petroleum, seemingly rings a few cool bells — a 26-minute doc! — but is in actuality not a making-of featurette but rather a silent-era industrial filmstrip that overlaps a good portion of the previous 15 minutes of footage. The lack of discussion from Anderson on a film with such an authorial stamp is severely problematic, but not necessarily a mortal wound. No, that designation would be saved for the lack of participation from Day-Lewis, for a role widely, and not undeservingly, acclaimed as among the most searingly memorable screen turns of the past decade. To have no chats with them — especially given all the awards-season stumping they did for the film — on a so-called “collector’s edition” is ridiculous. Even notorious commentary soundtrack-hater and DVD minimalist David Lynch thinks this DVD is short on supplemental insight. Still, to purchase the movie via Amazon anyway, click here. B (Movie) C- (Disc)
