Oil and trouble

>> Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood
is a riveting journey into hell

by MARK SLUTSKY

They should give Daniel Day-Lewis’s moustache an Oscar for all the work it does in There Will Be Blood. Or better yet, his vocal chords. Day-Lewis’s voice, transformed into something rich and threatening and deeply American, dominates P.T. Anderson’s latest movie, an amazingly idiosyncratic and often audacious journey into the darkness of one man’s wretched soul. It’s a story of obsession and greed, but those qualities are secondary to the movie’s fixation on a misanthropy so deep it’s practically alien. Day-Lewis emerges from a well at the beginning of the film, and it’s as if he’s a devil who’s crawled out of hell; Anderson spends the next two hours and 45 minutes taking him on a journey back there.

Loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, There Will Be Blood stars Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, a ruthless prospector who specializes in drilling for the black stuff in the American West circa turn-of-the-century. You first see him working with his hands, alone, and then with a small crew of men, and soon he’s travelling from town to town, talking the landowners into letting him dig for liquid gold and the majority of the profits. He’s accompanied by his grave-faced adopted son H.W. (Dillon Freasier), who gives him the air of being a family man, which puts the townsfolk’s minds at rest.

Day-Lewis is approached by Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), the son of a poor sharecropper who’s seen oil bubbling up on his family’s plot. Day-Lewis strikes a deal with the Sunday family to dig on their land in exchange for a pittance and the promise of a donation to Paul’s twin brother Eli’s (also played by Dano) church. But somehow this ignites a rivalry between the two men, and a vicious series of one-upmanship begins as Day-Lewis builds up the town, and his fortune.

His voice might do a lot of the heavy lifting, but Day-Lewis’s physicality is also pretty incredible. With his long, skinny legs, accentuated by the high-waisted pants he wears throughout the movie, he’s a wiry, skeletal force. As he makes clear, it’s not so much greed that animates him as a complete antipathy towards the rest of the human race, who he just wants to escape.

Daniel Plainview’s character doesn’t change much over the 30 years the film spans. Instead, what appears as change is really a slow unmasking of a man who knows how to be impeccably civil when he wants something. The richer and more unassailable he becomes, the more he reveals his wretchedness. At the end of the film, he’s a vile, violent scrap of a man, wallowing in his own filth and wealth.

As impressive as Day-Lewis’s performance is, this is also Anderson’s show, and he keeps getting better and better as a filmmaker. He’s confident, not flashy. Take the first 20 minutes of the film, which are dialogue-free, punctuated with Johnny Greenwood’s amazing, discordant score; pure filmmaking.

He also remains wilfully idiosyncratic. It’s hard to avoid the Kubrick comparisons with a film that jumps forward in time so mercilessly and has so little room for sentiment. And maybe there’s some truth to that. Many have criticized the ending too, which without giving anything away, closes the film on a wild, dramatic, even operatic note. Is it too much? For some, maybe, but the film lives up to its title, and if you can get behind what Anderson is doing, it’s a riveting, slightly messy, but undeniably powerful film.

There Will Be Blood opens this Friday, Jan. 11

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