There Will Be Blood

There have been Baftas, there have been Golden Globes and There Will Be Oscars. I’ve seen it twice and may be going to see it again this week – if that doesn’t convey just how utterly spellbinding this film is then nothing will. It’s a masterpiece, and I use that word being fully aware of its grandiosity and serious connotations. Now let me try and explain why.

In a bravura, not quite dialogue free opening twenty minute sequence we are introduced to Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a harsh, resilient prospector who is scrabbling in the dust and unearthly desert heat of late nineteenth century California to retrieve the precious scarce silver entombed in the mountains. By chance he stumbles across oil, wordlessly instructing his ill-equipped yet resourceful crew to drive further into the earth to plunder its concealed wealth. After an accident orphans one of his men’s children, Plainview adopts the child as his son, in one revealing scene anointing the child with oil as a fevered prayer for success.

13 years later and now a powerful figure, Plainview is informed of possible massive reserves of oil beneath the settlement of Little Boston, California. He visits the area and charms the residents into allowing him to drill and consequently financially bless their fragile community. There is however one obstacle to Plainview’s relentless and obsessive desire for wealth and power, his nemesis Ely, (superbly played by Paul Dano) Little Boston’s idealistic young preacher. The film is the story of their titanic clash of egos, their spiritual combat seemingly at times in struggle for the very soul of Daniels son.

The references and influences are clear. Director Paul Thomas Anderson ran Huston’s ‘The Treasure of Sierra Madre‘ throughout the writing process and he has clearly also been inspired by the likes of ‘Giant‘, ‘Citizen Kane’ and most critically ‘Days of Heaven’ – heck he even brought in the same production designer. Anderson used the book ‘Oil’ as his starting point and as he researched the history he slowly moulded and developed the film into nothing less than an almost biblical parable on greed, suffering and power, refracted through the prism of the American dream.

OK, let’s start with the central strut of the film – the performance by Daniel Day Lewis. I must confess that he is not one of my favourite actors. He is a terrific presence but I thought his performance in projects such as ‘Gangs of New York’ transformed an already flawed and diluted film into a total mess with his scene chewing antics being incredibly tiresome. He is so obviously ‘acting’ that you are distanced from the film and fail to connect to the characters or events on any emotional level. In ‘There Will Be Blood’ he has crafted one of the best performances I have ever seen on the big screen. From the start you’re not looking at Day-Lewis, you’re not looking at an actor – he is Daniel Plainview. In scene after scene he pummels you into submission, strategically revealing small clues to reveal that beneath this monster, beneath this misanthropic devil there is a human being with the same fears and needs as the rest of us. I immediately saw the grizzled John Huston in this performance, which in turn gives the film a tangible and very interesting connection to that other American classic ‘Chinatown’ where it was water, not oil that was the metaphor for commerce and capital, corruption and avarice.

 

Next, the score composed by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead. Controversially this was rendered illegal over some dispute of its similarity to some of the classical pieces used over the end credits – no, I’m not sure what they’re talking about either. I read in the paper over the weekend that this was due to the machinations of fellow composer James Newton Howard who was obviously feeling threatened by such an assault on traditional film composing -  Screw ‘em, this element of the film is beyond outstanding, it is utterly transformative and is unlike any other score with the exception of the atonal pieces in ‘The Shining’ or ‘2001′ – I’ll come back to that. This piece for example is one of the most beautiful and haunting pieces of music I’ve ever heard, when laid over the breathtaking montage of Plainview’s prospectors arriving at Little Boston, well, you have a sequence of such beauty that it literally brought tears to my eyes at both viewings. 

Some critics have speaking about this being PT Anderson’s ‘mature’ film which I think is patronising to say the least. Someone please tell me the immaturity in the build-up of tension in this sequence, or the sweeping multi-character montages in ‘Magnolia’? If ’Boogie Nights’ is his Scorsese, and ‘Magnolia’ his Altman – is this his Malick? Not quite, this for me is his Kubrick – to employ that aforementioned phrase this is a film that is pushing at the boundaries, straining at the limits of traditional, narrative cinema. Quite apart from the atonal score that brings to mind ‘The Shining’ or the wordless first half hour which of course recalls ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, he closes the film on a scene that is so incongruous, so out of tone and place to the preceding two hours and twenty minutes on your first viewing that you wonder what the hell happened – that’s Kubrick at work. It is quite telling that I, along with the most of the audience, was in hysterics at some of the events, developments and dialogue in the scene the first time I saw the film. The second time round however there was the odd nervous chuckle emanating from the audience but certainly no full on belly laughs – this I think illustrates just how it has polarised audiences. The second time round it fits perfectly and is tune with Andersons penchant for injecting magical realism in his films, think of the rain of frogs and sudden switch to the characters singing the soundtrack in ‘Magnolia‘, or the kaleidoscopic interludes in ‘Punch Drunk Love‘.  

The visual motifs include recurring images of fire, from flames sparked by matches to illuminate the shattered faces and spirits of the prospectors to geysers of oil, sheathed in flame, ignited in fury. We are treated to some exemplary examples of the tracking shot as Anderson focuses in with a laser like intensity on one man – Plainview and his exhausting thirst for wealth.

I honestly, genuinely believe we’ve got our first bona-fide American masterpiece of the 21st century and this is a film that will be discussed, imitated, dissected, loved and admired for as long as people talk about movies. You may think I’m being hysteric and maybe you’re right, but just take a look at some of the reviews this film has been garnering. There’s some reviews comparing this film to ‘Citizen Kane’ and not just in terms of subject matter – isolated American tycoon – but also in terms of its stylistic breakthroughs, its use of sound and image, its sense that the medium itself has been pushed forward. I find it fascinating that at the tail end of the most disastrous and corrupt presidencies in living memory, we are given three incredible films that examine that world, that mirror that ideology, that give us the American Dream manifest – corrupt, cruel, and ultimately hollow.

~ by mintyblonde on February 19, 2008.