D/S: Paul Thomas Anderson. Novel: “Oil!” by Upton Sinclair. P: JoAnne Sellar, Paul Thomas Anderson, Daniel Lupi. Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Dillon Freasier, Ciarán Hinds, Kevin J. O’Connor. UK dist (Blu-ray/DVD): Optimum Home Entertainment.
Inspired (very loosely) by Upton Sinclair’s sensational 1927 novel “Oil!”, There Will Be Blood is a mostly-excellent drama which wisely opts for a steely-eyed matter-of-factness in its depiction of the early days of the oil business. Never less than gripping, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film describes in brutally unromantic fashion the often literally back-breaking hard graft involved in the harvesting of Texas tea. The moral of the story: if you find yourself chest-deep in filth at the bottom of a very deep mine-shaft, you’d better be damn sure the men left up top do not boast the agility and sure-footedness of Jerry Lewis. The sudden eruptions of violence act as a kind of visceral punctuation, which in combination with the title’s ominous Gothic script, the discordant and eclectic score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Anderson’s tightly-controlled tracking shots creates a menacing air of doom-laden expectation.
Turning in the best John Huston impersonation you’ll ever see, Daniel Day-Lewis dominates the screen as misanthropic oilman Daniel Plainview, whose single-minded determination gradually reveals itself to be part of a more sinister pathology. Plainview is a real enigma, with little revealed of his background or upbringing that might help us account for his ruthless drive and distrust of intimacy; but we infer, from his relentless assaults upon the earth, that we are witnessing the prosecution of some private war against humanity. Perhaps that’s all we need to know. Aside from a climactic descent into cartoonish villainy, Day-Lewis is a riveting presence here and probably reason enough to watch the film. Blending avuncular charm with the glittering eye of a sociopath, he’d be perfect casting for Joe Stalin.
Not to be outdone in the uncanny mimicry stakes, Paul Dano channels the maniacal spirit of Gene Wilder as the equally deranged false prophet Eli Sunday. Much of the film’s dramatic conflict stems from the animosity between Plainview and Sunday, whose rather-too-emblematic names suggest an ironic subtext to the conflict: what appears on the surface to be a duel between secular industry and organised religion actually turns out to be a battle between two equally flawed and dysfunctional human beings, both driven by inner demons they refuse to face, neither capable of meaningful interaction with the world. The psychosis of fundamentalism has little to do with religion or politics, in the end.
At its best in the hard-as-nails first act, There Will Be Blood starts to work rather less well once Fred C.Dobbs and Charles Foster Kane cast their lengthy shadows across the material. Paranoid suspicion leads to murder by the camp-fire; matters are concluded with a curious EC-Comics retread of Citizen Kane. Thanks to a relative lack of inspiration in the film’s latter stages, Blood ultimately fails to resonate quite as strongly as it should, despite superlative overall qualities of writing, performance and direction. But this reviewer is hard to please. After Anderson’s extraordinary Magnolia (1999), I’ve been longing for him to make something that good again; perhaps inevitably There Will Be Blood falls short, though it makes an undeniably powerful first impression.