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There Will Be Blood
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: January 8, 2007

If you don’t mind being challenged by a movie… or submitting yourself to more emotional, psychological, and philosophical substance than most full-grown adults can digest in one sitting, then you can hardly do better than to see the new Paul Thomas Anderson film There Will Be Blood. Folks, it takes a lot to rattle the modern filmgoer, but coming out of this movie I felt like I’d just attended the first public performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. If you’ve ever endured Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream you might consider your nervous system at least somewhat prepared. But unlike that intimate portrait of modern day drug addiction, this film is a sprawling early-twentieth-century epic with grand interwoven themes. Two days later, though my stress levels have abated, I still find myself pondering the rich, dark, patient story about capitalism, evangelism, the curse of power, the rape of the natural world, and, lest we fail to notice, alcoholism. A trifling film it is not.

There Will Be Blood stars Daniel Day-Lewis as an oil tycoon named Daniel Plainview. As the film begins he is prospecting for precious metals in the middle of nowhere—and it’s a hands on, low-tech, dangerous undertaking indeed. These early scenes are crucial in establishing this character’s relentless, solitary, hell-bent spirit. Comparisons will surely be drawn to Charles Foster “Citizen” Kane, but I am more exactly reminded of Thomas Sutpen, the ruthless, stubborn, contempt-afflicted monstrosity from William Faulkner’s nigh-impenetrable masterpiece Absalom, Absalom! Plainview uses anyone of any use, despises everyone in his midst, stops at nothing to get what he wants, and holds a grudge for as long as it takes. His sheer un-changeableness is an almost shocking thing to see in a movie, and yet it is totally believable. After all, in real life, people refuse to change just about 9 times out of 10.

Day-Lewis is phenomenal, completely inhabiting the character, dominating the screen, and reveling in the attention as good performers must. But he is accompanied by two equally-spectacular co-stars. One is Mother Earth (as herself.) The American vistas in this film are more than breathtaking; they have tremendous meaning in the context of the story. The landscapes look excruciatingly vulnerable and at the same time bigger and more generous than the puny human characters can fathom. For all of Plainview’s ravenousness he is frequently dwarfed or engulfed by his surroundings. Furthermore, Anderson brilliantly drenches his whole film in oil. It leaks and gouts and pools everywhere, and the characters practically bathe in it. Things do finally get bloody, as promised in the film’s title, but until then, the bloodletting is reserved mostly for our planet, and it’s a distinctly unsettling sight. That’s not to say this is an “environmental film,” any more than it is a film about the pathology of boozing oneself into oblivion every night. But those two elements are present throughout, woven in with the more overt themes about the American bootstrapping tradition. And the effect is to add a whole subtle dimension to the film—an indictment of success at the expense of consciousness.

Another significant dramatic part is played by the utterly unique orchestral score, written by Johnny Greenwood, the guitarist for the rock band Radiohead. I admit I was reminded at times of the dissonant celestial harmonies from 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the stark-naked, viciously slicing string sections from Psycho. But this film also featured music like nothing I’ve ever heard before; frequently it is designed to set the nerves on edge, to ensure that viewers feel uncomfortable with the pioneering and engineering taking place on screen. Anderson has taken chances like this before, and has indeed alienated some viewers and critics in the past. For instance Punch Drunk Love featured some very disturbing sonic undertones that broke occasionally into blissful sounds and colors. And the score for Magnolia at times deliberately drowned out the dialogue; also for one long section it superimposed a marching orchestral number over several rock songs. “Intrusive!” people said, as if it wasn’t clever as hell. Now There Will Be Blood offers a score that will knock down the doors to the darkest corners of your soul. Be advised, folks. It’s intrusive.

Once you get past the blazing originality of the presentation though, this film is still about the story, and what a tale it is. Considering its title, and the spewing geysers of oil onscreen, it is tempting to look for omens about our modern “No blood for oil!” chanting generation. Furthermore, the yarn devotes most of its attention to a 20-year-long engagement of wills between Plainview and a local evangelical preacher named Eli Sunday, who seeks to exploit the oilman for his own financial gain. (Eli is portrayed brilliantly by young Paul Dano from Little Miss Sunshine.) However any connection between this film’s machinations and our current multi-national, highly-dysfunctional, oil-and-blood-drenched, religeo-political bedfellowships is purely primordial. More than anything this is the story of the curse of the self-made man. Plainview is a personification of Nietzsche’s “Will to Power,” not only vis-à-vis his Nietzschean mustache, and not only because a craving for autonomy motivates his every step, but because the magnitude of his own will has made everyone else contemptible to him. How this contempt plays out over the course of this movie is the stuff of cinematic greatness. This film will give you plenty to mull over after the lights go up. But perhaps its greatest achievement is to illustrate the bleak and lonesome fast lanes opened up by un-checked capitalism. Yowza! What a movie.

Copyright © 2007 Theo Michelfeld