Blood For Oil
by Chris Dashiell

There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of a 1927 book by Upton Sinclair, contains a dense novelistic actuality under its deceptively bare surface. In this tale of a scrappy oil prospector and his journey to wealth, Anderson has himself gathered and quarried a mass of detailed material, while leaving small gaps and fissures in which are concealed hidden clues and mysteries of character. With Daniel Day-Lewis, an actor willing and able to do anything required, in the lead role, the film gains a propulsive power and significance designed to catch the viewer off guard.

The wordless prelude shows the lone prospector Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) hacking into the wall of a primitive mine with his pickax, and later suffering a leg-breaking fall into the hole—noting the first faint presence of oil in the rock even before dragging himself out after his injury. Jumping ahead five years, another virtually dialogue-free scene reveals Plainview, now with a hired crew, starting to bring the black gold up, bucket by bucket. One of the men holds a baby, and an accident (a common peril in these days) takes the man’s life. These sequences, which seem to serve only as evocations of the arduous labor and mechanics of the early oil trade, silently point to later facts and conundrums of Plainview’s life.

When we first hear Plainview (Day-Lewis gives the character’s speaking voice a formal, declamatory quality that can be unnerving) he is talking to a group of small-town residents, offering them a deal for their land, and accompanied by his young son H.W. (the remarkable Dillon Freasier). The scene is to be repeated in different forms and contexts later in the film, for Plainview is driven to expand his business and own more and more oil-rich land. The story’s main thread begins when he gets a tip about a potential bonanza from a young man named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), the son of a California goat-farmer. When Plainview visits the Sunday household with his son, pretending to be quail hunters, his bid for the land runs into a troublesome obstacle—Paul’s twin brother Eli (also played by Dano), a young evangelical preacher determined to build and expand his local “Church of the Third Revelation.” The struggle between the taciturn businessman and the impudent young preacher (Dano brings a note of grasping, febrile hysteria to the role) adds an undercurrent of grim humor to the film.

This theme — big oil and fundamentalist religion in uneasy alliance — seems uncannily pertinent to the current American situation. Run-of-the-mill directors would point their story towards this theme like a teacher pointing at a blackboard. Anderson, however, uses these elements only as an underlying structure, in the manner of historical causes and conditions. He chooses to turn his light on the inner forces and turmoil of the soul. Plainview, Sunday, and the other characters are not symbols of social trends or events; they have the complex solidity of living individuals, so that even if their lives and motives cast a reflection on our times, their presence and effect is starkly human.

Day-Lewis can be so dominating a performer that there’s a danger, as in Gangs of New York, of diminishing the other actors. Anderson avoids that mistake by allowing the film’s formal aspects to play an overt, active role. Jonny Greenwood’s modernist, often dissonant musical score (he’s a member of the group Radiohead), and a few choice bits from other orchestral pieces, insistently accompanies the action, especially in the sequences of physical labor, creating an urgent, ambivalent mood: foreboding, convulsive, sometimes inhuman, sometimes hinting at mounting tragedy. Anderson regular Robert Elswit outdoes himself with his richly toned cinematography, and production designer Jack Fisk delivers a miraculous simulation of early twentieth century America in the hardscrabble West.

There are several themes that are weaved in startling and unexpected ways throughout the film’s fabric, including deafness as a telling aspect of Plainview’s relationship with his son (one scene involving the boy yelling from a departing train as we see Day-Lewis walking away in the foreground, unhearing, is painful in the watching and in recollection) and the telling of stories as both a means of survival and betrayal. The appearance of a previously unknown half-brother (Kevin J. O’Connor) gives Plainview the brief hope of family connection, but his way is by necessity one of isolation. The mystery of this eccentric character is not lessened by remarking that he is driven, not so much by the desire for money as the need to be better than anyone else, and that this ends up turning all other people into competitors and objects of contempt. The final scene, brutal and strangely funny, ties the personal and the historical together without sacrificing the tale’s elusive quality, the power that conceals while it gives. However repellant Plainview may be, and he is not a character one can easily hold to one’s heart, he is no mere object lesson. We are bound to feel some compassion for him by virtue of the few penetrating glimpses we are allowed inside, and this is a key to the movie’s tragic power.

The way of the greatest actors is to make the performance seem inseparable from the character, and Day-Lewis hereby confirms his reputation in that regard. There Will Be Blood also eliminates any remaining doubts concerning Paul Thomas Anderson’s stature as a director. Here he demonstrates not only a command of material, and its shaping, which separates the good director from the merely competent, but the form he gives to his film leads us to a specific vision and meaning, personal to him and relevant to us, that completes both our enjoyment and understanding. The director and his film have earned the title, so rarely deserved, of “great.”