Movie review: There Will Be Blood

by John P. Meyer

Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights; Magnolia; Punch-Drunk Love) is a guy who's not afraid to take chances with his filmmaking, which automatically makes the prospect of seeing a movie by him exciting. Pair up a visionary director like Anderson with a force majeure actor like Daniel Day-Lewis and expectations go through the roof.

In There Will Be Blood, Day-Lewis is allowed (nay, he appears to have been encouraged) to chew up and spit out not only the scenery but also the hangy-down parts of any characters with whom he comes into contact. To call his portrayal forceful would be like referring to Krakatoa as a pop gun, and the volcano is an apt metaphor. The experience of watching Day-Lewis' character (Daniel Plainview) as he progresses through the film (and, coincidentally, the stages of his career) is a bit like having a front-row seat at an incipient eruption: there's mountain building, then tremors and pyroclastic flows followed by earthquakes and sudden explosions. By the final reel, Daniel Plainview emotes so forcefully that he's actually spewing slobber around the set.

The edgy and uncomfortable interpersonal dynamics are enhanced by a score (including original music by Jonny Greenwood) which is janglingly edgy in its own right, reminiscent at times of the string compositions of Bernard Herrmann. Prepare to squirm in your seat, and not just from the film's 2 1/2 hour run-time.

Stir into this heady collaborative mix the artistry of cinematographer Robert Elswit (who worked with Anderson on several previous films) and what results is a series of craftily composed landscapes which themselves become characters in the story - such as the ominous devil-horned peaks featured in the first reel.

When we first encounter Daniel Plainview, he's a strapping hard rock miner - working alone - using single jack and pick and giant powder (i.e., dynamite) to hammer and blast ores from the rocky Hades of a Chihuahuan desert locale. Striking it moderately rich, he transfers his prospecting interests from precious metals to oil, lifeblood of burgeoning industry. He's an early adopter in this sense, and soon finds himself spearheading a crew of single-minded men digging a shaft into the earth and (eventually) shoveling petroleum slurry into buckets: a crude forerunner to the modern practice of drilling for crude.

As a result of a practically pre-ordained work-related accident, Plainview finds himself the guardian of an orphaned infant who he unaccountably takes under his wing and raises as his own child. The boy - H.W. (played in his juvenile incarnation by wide-eyed newcomer Dillon Freasier) - becomes a featured talking point and visual aid in Plainview's self-promotion appearances at community meeting houses as he lobbies to obtain mineral lease rights.

Plainview's sudden articulate speechifying is all the more startling because it follows a bizarre opening sequence in which there is no dialog whatsoever; all through his solitary mining activities and extending into the episode involving petroleum excavation, the characters remain fervently mute, communicating solely through gesture and meaningful glance. It's as if the alien and seemingly malevolent landscape has rendered them inarticulate. Perhaps their pit has become an inverted tower of Babel; or maybe there is only one concept worthy of their shared consideration, and it requires no discussion: striking it rich.

As Plainview's fortunes grow he attracts all sorts of characters into his eccentric orbit, none more wobbly than a young man named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano, who to his acting credit gives Mr. Day-Lewis a run for his scenery-chewing money). This ambitious lad has a hot lead on a prime undiscovered oil-rich territory, and he's willing to part with its whereabouts for a price. Plainview takes a chance on the mysterious kid's information and thereby catapults himself into the oil magnate catbird seat; before he's done Plainview will have the cream of the robber baron crop knocking at his mineral leasing door, offering vast quantities of cash for his stake in the properties under development. But Plainview doesn't like sharing the wealth...

This same enigmatic lad (master Sunday) reappears later in the guise of Eli, a charismatic church leader who enthralls his congregation with miraculous cures and spectacular religious conversions. By this point Eli and Plainview have become rivals for the leadership of the community where they both operate, and (barring homicide) there will be no way to deal with each other except through compromise - which is an uncomfortable concept for both characters. Tension builds, and is occasionally violently released. (Cue the volcanoes.)

The farther down the road to ultimate power Plainview strides, the more unstable his character becomes. When H.W.'s influence is absented from his daily routine (under circumstances that go a long way toward revealing the true nature of Plainview's proprietary interest in the boy), the cloak of civilization he's crafted for himself slips away; violent and socially unsettling public outbursts occur with increasing frequency; and the road to Daniel Plainview's extended self-destruction becomes festooned with the remnants of those who cross his path along with way.

Without revealing too much about the movie's cataclysmic ending - which transpires with a stroke of genius slapstick black comedy in the private bowling alley of Daniel Plainview's gone-to-seed estate - I will go so far as to say that the promise of the title achieves literal fruition.

DO TELL?: "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed." - Daniel Plainview

TRUE CONFESSIONS IN THE BOWLING ALLEY: "The Devil grabbed hold of me in ways I never imagined." - Eli Sunday, explaining his circumstances to Plainview

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