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December 5th, 2008
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Hell to pay

P.T. Anderson's latest epic is a spoil of riches

April 2nd, 2008 issue

By Rachel Shimp

A family affair. Dillon Freasier and Daniel Day-Lewis appear (quite) respectable in There Will Be Blood.
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There Will Be Blood


Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
With Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Kevin J. O'Connor, Ciaran Hinds, and Dillon Freasier

For the Post
When Daniel Day-Lewis accepted his Oscar for Best Actor in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, his clean-shaven face, British accent and polite (if eccentric) demeanor must have surprised many who enjoyed him as Blood’s ruthless oil tycoon, Daniel Plainview. The force of his acting is great, and it’s said that he rarely breaks character during filming.
The actor who learned Czech for his role as Tomáš in 1988’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being has starred in just four films in the past decade, two of which set up connections for this latest success. 2005’s The Ballad of Jack and Rose, directed by Day-Lewis’ wife, Rebecca Miller, brought him together with Paul Dano, who plays his adversary in Blood. And, in Gangs of New York, from 2002, audiences watched with unease as his Bill “The Butcher” Cutting tapped the tip of a knife blade against his glass eye.    
Day-Lewis’ Plainview is an infinitely more menacing character. This doesn’t come forth right away, but his bone-breaking work ethic does, as he happens upon oil while mining for silver in the last days of the 1800s. His team starts to harness the liquid gold, and among the dusty, sweaty chaos we notice a baby in the camp. He appears to be the son of one of the workers, who finds time before an accidental death to anoint the child’s forehead with oil. That secular baptism is a powerful visual in a movie full of them.
It also sets up the primary rumination. Religious fanaticism or unchecked capitalism: Which is creepier? Which is more lethal?
Anderson loosely based Blood on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 book Oil!, less well-known than The Jungle, which single-handedly changed the way Americans viewed the meatpacking industry. Anderson uses Oil! as a template for his statement on the effects of tyranny, although those effects are focused on the demimonde of Plainview and his victims. Anderson’s Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love were atmospheric films with spare dialogue; the same goes here. In fact, the first 20 minutes or more of Blood is soundtracked only with the blows of digging instruments and an excellent score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. The humming cellos and violins are taut and relentless, like locusts.
By 1911, Plainview is going from plot to plot, trying to loose communities of their oil-rich land with a promise of shared wealth. His mannerisms are of someone absolutely in control, with wheels forever turning. As his jaw clicks back and forth in thought, his eyes are steeled straight ahead — but rest assured he could see you coming from behind. He brings the grown-up baby, now called his “son and partner” H.W., as a “sweet face” to show the people that he’s running an honest family business. But not everyone buys it.
One day, a mysterious young man named Paul Sunday shows up at Plainview’s office with a lucrative tip — for a price. Plainview pays the kid off and heads to the family ranch that Sunday has sold out in New Boston, California, indeed finding that oil literally bubbles up from the ground. He scouts the land under the ruse of quail hunting, and confides to H.W. that they’ll give the Sundays “quail prices, not oil prices.”
Meanwhile, Paul has apparently split, and has been replaced by his twin brother (is it really?) Eli, a charismatic preacher whose only concern is that Plainview develop his church along with the roads, schools and wheat fields he’s promised the community. But, when Plainview dishonors a vow to let Eli bless the new derrick, a lifelong bitterness is born.
Eli is also a calculating man. Beneath his baby face there’s a quiet malice and a need for attention, which he gets at his Church of the Third Revelation. (The film doesn’t mention what’s in that particular book of Revelation — a letter from Jesus to a dying church that advises repentance, or else.) “Get out of here, ghost!” Eli commands while laying hands on an arthritis sufferer. It’s clear that the thirst for oil continues in modern times, but so do religious theatrics like this.
Who’s more haunted, Eli or Plainview? Plainview’s second personal confession in the film is to an itinerant friend: “I hate most people.” Apparently that extends even to H.W., who lies injured after a rig explodes while Plainview stares with rabid passion at his future wealth.
Eventually, Plainview is a ghost himself, wandering a luxe mansion. It has a bowling alley with two lanes, and you have to wonder who the second one is for. Plainview would sooner hurl the ball at another human than play alongside one.
    
Rachel Shimp can be reached at rshimp@praguepost.com


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