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Daniel Day-Lewis triumphs in Paul Thomas Anderson's incomparable masterpiece There Will Be Blood |
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis (Daniel Plainview), Paul Dano (Eli
Sunday/Paul Sunday), Kevin J. O’Connor (Henry), Ciarán Hinds (Fletcher Hamilton),
Dillon Fraser (HW Plainview), Russell Harvard (Adult HW Plainview), David
Willis (Able Sunday), Hans Howes (William Brandy), Paul F. Tompkins (Prescott)
Citizen Kane’s original title was “American”. David
Thomson observed perhaps there hasn’t been another film so deserving of that
title until
There Will Be Blood. This is one of those once-in-a-decade
films, possibly the greatest American film of the twenty-first century and
Anderson’s career-defining masterpiece. It’s a gripping exploration of what
makes America tick, captured within the self-destructive greed and hunger for
power of one man. It’s a stunning piece of work, a cast-iron masterpiece, that
takes a stack of influences and reinvents them into something fresh, daring,
bold and above all unrepeatably unique.
Adapted very loosely from Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil,
the film follows thirty years in the life of Daniel Plainview (Daniel
Day-Lewis), a misanthropic and fiercely ambitious empire-building oil man.
Running a ‘family business’ with his adopted son HW (Dillon Fraser) – the boy’s
father having been killed in a drilling accident – Plainview takes up a sea of
leases across California. The film focuses on his exploitation of a rich seam
under the community of Little Boston. A very religious community – dominated by
the strong-willed Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), almost a mirror image of Plainview’s
monomania – Little Boston becomes the setting for Plainview’s struggles with men
and land, in a growing cacophony of drama that inevitably (as the title
promises) builds towards an explosion.
Watching it you can see the inspirations. It reflects The
Treasure of the Sierra Madre (which Anderson watched endlessly in
preparation) in its chilling exploration of the impact of greed and Plainview
is the grandfather of Charles Foster Kane. It’s set in a Fordian west, but filtered
through the unique vision of Kubrick. But it’s not a slave to these: it’s a
truly original work, an off-kilter epic, shot with a stunning beauty that’s
half poetry, half gothic horror by Robert Elswit. It sounds like no film ever
made, a deeply unsettling score that mixes discordant rhythm and
baroque-inspired strings by Johnny Greenwood.
And it has two geniuses at its centre. Anderson, a director
best known for large-scale ensemble pieces, inverts his style to focus on one
single misanthropic force of nature, a man who sees people as only tools or
rivals. His film hits every note from near silent-cinema expressionism, to
Grand Guignol fever-dream intensity. It’s shot with an all-consuming urgency,
long-takes of fluid camera movement, mixed with interrogative still shots. The
film digs itself into your soul, takes hold and doesn’t let go. It’s at times
as darkly funny, as it is horrifyingly bleak. No one else could have made it.
And no one else could have played Plainview. If There
Will Be Blood cemented Anderson as one of the leading directors of the
early 21st century, it confirmed Day-Lewis as the era’s greatest
actor. Day-Lewis is beyond superb here: this is the sort of, epoch defining
performance you see only a few times in your life. Hunched forward, like a man
constantly on the move, dark eyes gleaming and his voice a malevolently rolling
John-Huston inspired baritone, Day-Lewis makes Plainview a misanthropic
monster. He’s articulate, instinctive and destructive. Achieving his dreams
only makes him even more inhuman and bitter. And Day-Lewis makes clear the stunted,
half-grown creature under the skin of the confident businessman.

It’s clear he’s desperately lonely, but seemingly only has
enough humanity in him for one relationship at a time – even then, people still
must serve a purpose. HW – and later Henry, the man who arrives on his land
claiming to be his brother (a wonderful inscrutable performance from Kevin J
O’Connor) – become props in the family business. Plainview reaches out to them
for emotional connection, but it’s all one way. When an accident robs the young
HW of his hearing, Plainview is incapable of caring for him – he treats the
deafness like a betrayal. He banishes HW, just as he will banish and punish all
those who he sees as betraying him, including Henry. There isn’t a scene that
doesn’t have a piece of performative magic from Day-Lewis.
Alongside this genius, Anderson’s subject is America. It’s a
stunning exploration of how capitalism, greed and an insatiable hunger for more
– be it money, land, power or anything else worth a jot of value – has shaped
the country. Plainview is the dark soul of pioneering American entrepreneurial
spirit, obsessed to the elimination of anything else, with accumulation. Oil is
the life blood of the country, God’s own gift of power wrapped in a dangerous
black liquid. It’s pumping through the country’s soil, and to control it is to
control the country’s circulation. It’s Plainview’s faith – and it’s the faith
of all these men forging an empire out of the ground, motivated by the desire for
more. It’s partly why the film is so focused on men – because it’s always
grasping men like this, titans of industry, who shape the dark soul of our civilisation.
Nothing will please Plainview until he controls all around
him, confessing in a quiet moment (there are no words for how brilliantly
unrepentant, yet also strangely regretful Day-Lewis is in this underplayed
scene) that he has “a competition within him. I want no one else to succeed. I
hate most people.” Like the country itself, he has forged himself from nothing
through naught but will-power and a determination to never know failure. There
Will Be Blood argues that, much as we might want to think otherwise,
America is built on the backs of men like Plainview – monsters with the vision
and determination to turn a desert into a city.
God himself has no place in these calculations. Anderson
contrasts the obsessive sweat of Plainview with the dogmatic and vainglorious
Christianity of Eli Sunday (a brilliantly weasly Paul Dano). Eli’s church is a haven
of evangelistic worship and showmanship, which Plainview immediately finds
disgusting (does he recognise another expert peddler of bullshit?). Eli has a
moral arrogance and as much as a desire to control as Plainview, and the battle
that grows between these two for dominance not only shows the ruthlessness of
both men, but also reflects the struggle between religious obligation and
Mammon that has run through America’s history.
The rivalry between the two men revolves around three
crucial confrontations. Having effectively robbed valuable land from Eli’s
family for a pittance, Plainview then humiliates Eli, forcing him head first
into the mud, refusing to allow him any influence over his dig. Eli’s revenge
comes in spades: controlling a vital piece of land for Plainview’s pipeline, he
demands Plainview comes to his church to be rebaptised. The resulting scene
sees him goad, provoke and demean Plainview for his sins, forcing Plainview
into a series of humiliating confessions (both actors are earth-shakingly brilliant).

Their final reckoning closes the film – and is both its most
controversial and overblown sequence. Jumping forward fifteen years, to Plainview’s
sprawling mansion (where Day-Lewis has become a dishevelled hermit, his
misanthropy unchecked and his victories only confirming his loathing of humanity)
it’s the famous ‘milkshake’ scene, played with the sort of OTT intensity only
Day-Lewis could risk and which the film has carefully built us towards
accepting. Blood-dripped in a Kubrickian setting of a bowling alley, it’s the
final expression of two men’s mutual hatred and views of a world – Eli’s that
it owes him something for his faith, Plainview’s that he controls it through
will alone.
Only a film that has built on such firm grounding of
escalating tension and excess could make such a scene a success. This is a film
that starts with a near-silent 15 minutes, of Plainview hammering with a
pickaxe obsessively in the belly of the country’s soil. It ends – after a long
journey that has seen Plainview wheedle, steal, bully and grasp – with him
entombed again, this time in his mausoleum of a home, no daylight allowed and
the air filled with Plainview’s hate-filled rants. Along the way, we’ve seen
the plains of California as a place of dreamy beauty, marshalled to the will of
one man to control all around him, scenes of striking beauty and haunting intensity.
There Will Be Blood is a masterpiece, an inspired
parable for American history, a showcase for one of the greatest actors of his
generation to redefine his craft and a marvel of character study, epic vision
and haunting lyricism from its director. There is not a false note in it and it
stands towering as a landmark in American film history. The greatest American
film of the 2000s? Possibly yes.