Thicker Than Water

[January 9th, 2008]

“Ladies and gentlemen, when I say I’m an oilman, you will agree.” These are some of the first words to come rumbling up from the throat of Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood . The proclamation doesn’t arrive until nearly 25 minutes into the picture, but it makes up for lost time, and says a lot about the man we’ve begun to meet. Day-Lewis is portraying oilman Daniel Plainview, and by the time he’s finished, you will agree that he is many things: a megalomaniac, a misanthrope and a man whose jealousy, self-regard and wrath resemble the Yahweh of the Old Testament—who just happens to be his biggest rival. (Might as well pick on somebody your own size.) Daniel Plainview crawls up out of a hole in the ground, and spends his every waking hour trying to tap into the lake of fire under his feet. In a rare moment of vulnerability, he confesses, “I have a competition in me,” and, as his face is bathed in fiery orange light, he resembles no one so much as Milton’s Lucifer: “In my choice, to reign is worth ambition, though in hell.” Daniel Plainview does not lack for ambition.

Neither does Paul Thomas Anderson. The book the director has adapted for his fifth movie is not Paradise Lost but Upton Sinclair’s Oil! , and it’s a sign of Anderson’s confidence that he threw out the last two-thirds of the novel and expanded the lead role to fit Day-Lewis, the world’s most ferocious actor. The gamble worked: There Will Be Blood is the best movie made in 2007. It aims for storytelling effects not seen at the cinema since the height of 1970s arthouse epics, and even when it stumbles, it remains a work of breathtaking nerve.

The movie often looks like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Certainly when Day-Lewis makes his first appearance, hacking away at the bottom of a silver mine, he’s unrecognizable. But he soon trims his beard down to a dapper mustache, trades his silver interests for oil speculation, and adopts an orphan (a boy played with terrific solemnity by Dillon Freasier) when the child’s father dies with the first strike. Windfalls and disasters seem to come in pairs for Daniel Plainview. This is never so true as when a young man named Paul Sunday alerts him to “an ocean of oil” in the California desert, and Plainview discovers that it exists—but comes with the price tag of Paul’s twin, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a hypnotic Pentecostal preacher who wants a share of the power and the glory. That’s a broad outline of the plot, though it scarcely does justice to the rhythms of Robert Elswit’s cinematography and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s score, or the way that Anderson concentrates on detail: In the movie’s opening half, we learn as much about the rigors of drilling as we do about the people overseeing it.

The movie’s scope, along with Anderson’s nods to his favorite films, invites critics to play “Name That Tune” with the components. (There’s a tracking shot from Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon ! Day-Lewis’ voice sounds like John Huston in Chinatown !) But to appreciate the achievement of There Will Be Blood , it’s best to look at how it emerges from Anderson’s own pictures: Hard Eight , Boogie Nights , Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love . In all of those movies, Anderson showed a fascination with makeshift families, a deft hand with actors, and a weakness for brash showboating. If his new movie feels like a departure and a leap forward, it’s not because he’s jettisoned these instincts but because he’s restricted them, narrowing his focus to a single man and the people he battles, manipulates and—in one special case—loves. Anderson has bottled his own contents under high pressure.

Then, with one hard shake, the movie’s final act gushes out with the hysterical force of Plainview’s wells. Daniel Day-Lewis howls and roars and even does a little dance, which he tops off with an unforgettable (and very funny) victory chant: “I drink your milkshake!”
Download audio file (milkshake.mp3)
Yet this frenzy is balanced against Anderson’s clearest distillation of his theme of family. The blood of the title is a flexible symbol, used to reference the corporate thirst for oil, impending violence and even the Blood of the Lamb. But most of all it speaks to the fragile tie that binds a father and a son, a link that can be severed by a single word. There Will Be Blood exposes the most delicate of emotions—and sits them down next to pure delirium. Anderson’s work is brave, and crazy, and maybe a little foolish. But a director’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s movie heaven for?