There Will Be BloodDirector: Paul Thomas AndersonGenre: Drama Publisher: Paramount Vantage/Miramax Released: 12/26/2007 MPAA Rating: R Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Kevin J. O'Connor, Ciaran Hinds |
A Review by Chris Barsanti
12/19/2007
It is actually not hyperbole to say Lewis creates here one of film history's greatest performances; even if it does start off with a dialogue-free quarter-hour in which Plainview does nothing more than dig deep into the earth for his sustenance and nearly kill himself in the process. Not long after that, Anderson puts him in front of a small audience who have gathered to hear him say how he can earn them money, and from the first time one hears that pursed-lip, overly theatrical bass of a voice say, "I'm an oil man," it's as though one has heard the voice of Moses. Something about that delicate and nearly mute son of his (Kevin J. O'Connor as the closest thing the film has to a decent human being) sitting next to Plainview helps complete the picture and he knows it.
Plainview is a man always on stage, watching his audience with one cocked and cold eye, looking for that moment to strike. It's hardly surprising that the world seems to part itself for this quite possibly mad man, as he's put everything he has into this performance, this impressive shield of a façade that's both reassuring in its power and deeply frightening -- both viewers of the film and other characters sharing the screen with Plainview know full well that no living thing would want to be between him and something he desired. This is a lesson that the born-again preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), who sees dollars for the taking in the oil derricks being erected on his family's land, would do well to heed.
For There Will Be Blood has bigger game to hunt than the particular lunacies of one extraordinarily driven man on the soon-to-be-stitched fringe of the nation. Loosely inspired by Sinclair Lewis' novel Oil!, this is a history of American capitalism, boiled down to its rapacious essentials and paired with an equally hungry and competitive Christianity -- the twinned belief systems coil through the film with serpentine menace. One could read the film on any number of metaphorical levels, particularly as the toxic relationship between Plainview and Sunday deepens and darkens. But fortunately such readings are hardly necessary to enjoy There Will Be Blood, because Lewis is there in practically every scene, fighting to grab and hold one's attention with a feral gusto that almost manages to shame his arm-twister of a performance in Gangs of New York. Put more simply: this is a film that has been directed with a skill and grace that one just doesn't honestly see anymore.
When last seen, Paul Thomas Anderson was doing his level best to coax a performance of some sort out of Adam Sandler for Punch-Drunk Love. The film was hardly a wash, with some gripping work by the supporting cast and some memorably Dadaistic moments, but it seemed to show Anderson spinning his wheels. Another inexplicable dark fable of Southern California, only with less direction and purpose than anything we'd seen from him previously, and little of those films' gutsy audacity. Out in the wide-open fields of Texas where much of There Will Be Blood was filmed, Anderson loosens himself up and turns his city-trained eyes on some awe-inspiring scenery, foreground it with a pair of devilish opportunists and backgrounding it with a trilling, otherworldly score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. There's none of the look-at-me moments from Anderson's earlier work, whether the into-the-pool camera plunge of Boogie Nights or Biblical plague of frogs from the sky in Magnolia, but what needs such things when the camera (steadily held and all-encompassing, no need for Steadicam on these plains) sees only the ravishing beauty of soon-to-be-despoiled nature as far as the eye can take it?
Always somewhat of a showboater, Anderson slows down in There Will Be Blood, taking a backseat here to the landscape and his performers, concentrating more on the story at hand than dazzling the audience. There's in fact little else that Anderson needs to do to jazz up his sparse screenplay, given that his story is nothing else than a bloody-fanged, no-prisoners take on full-tilt Manifest Destiny greed with the entrepreneur as possible psychopath and the preacher as dangerous charlatan. In short: an all-American tale.
© Copyright CultureCartel.com 12/19/2007
