The title of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is not a statement. It's a promise. And the promise is kept.
Anderson's sprawling, beautifully ambitious fifth feature is at once a premonition of the coming American century from the vantage point of the beginning of that century, and a meditation on the violent and charismatic character at the core the energy that drove that century.
While Anderson's two best features to date, Boogie Nights and Magnolia, were multi-character/plot films that dazzled in part by their complexity, There Will Be Blood sticks close to its main character. Daniel Plainview who is emotionally fractured, removed from his history, and plaintively alone.
The opening of the film is played largely without dialog. We meet Plainview who is a increasingly successful oilman just before the turn of the century. Near the beginning he adopts a young lad named H.W. whom he rears as his own. The tender and playful scenes with the young boy are the only shreds of warm humanity we see from the character.
A young man, Paul Sunday, comes to Plainview and sells him information about land rich in oil that can be had cheap. it turns out that harsh desert landscape that bears the bubbling crude is home to the his family's ranch. Plainview buys the ranch and all the surrounding land on his way to major oil bonanza.
Here he encounters Sunday's brother, Eli, a young and charismatic preacher with ambitions of his own. Well played by Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine), Sunday represents the other force in the tug of American tension between oil/business and religion. As ambitious in his own way as the driven Plainview, Eli is in some ways the mirror of the film's central character.
The undercurrent of father son relationships is core to the film, Eli's dismissive with his own father, Plainview's more complex and changing relationship with H.W. and the mysterious haunted memory of his own father, are emotional fissures that tear through the film. Even the step by step, humiliation by humiliation current of Eli and Plainview's relationship has some of the brutal force of the Old Testament mixed with the Old West.
In fact it is the relationship between Plainview and H.W. that is the emotional core of the film, and gives it much of its enduring resonance. This is no small part due to a haunting performance by newcomer Dillon Freasier.
Ostensibly an adaptation of Upton Sinclair's novel Oil, the book is more of a starting point for Anderson. This is a major career shifting film for him - astounding in its audacity and ambition, it is the mature work of a filmmaker hitting his stride. His shots are prosaically composed, arresting and informing in each frame. The large expanses of non-verbal, loose framing is most reminiscent of the original film making of the 1970s.
But the core of the film, and overwhelming reason for its success is the riveting, brutal, and larger than life performance of Daniel Day Lewis. Since the film is almost myopically focused on Plainview, Lewis' work is essential. It is hard, after leaving the theater, to think of any actor his equal or even in his realm. This is another character whom inhabits down to the molecules of the DNA, holding the film together while filling every crease and crevice of it. If there was a better performance this year I haven't seen it.
Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood also delivers a rich soundtrack that steers away from the expected. That choice allows it to help evoke unexpected emotions, and create and support the ever present sense of tension and impending danger.
With its subject matter, setting, and superb work by all concerned, There Will Be Blood is an instant masterpiece and likely a soon to be classic.
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