THERE WILL BE BLOOD
Paramount Vantage/ Miramax Films
Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey Karten
Grade:B
Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson
Written By: Paul Thomas Anderson, from Upton Sinclair’s Novel “Oil”
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Dillion Freasier, Ciaran Hinds, Sydney McCallister, David Willis, David Warshofsky, Cotton Woodward, Colleen Foy, Russell Harvard
Screened at: Chelsea West, NYC, 11/29/07
Opens: December 26, 2007 Some people say that oil is proof of the existence of an intelligent being. Just think of its uses. Oil propels cars and planes. It’s used to make compact disks, pain relievers and other medicines, plastic bottles, Saran Wrap, canned goods, plant fertilizer, and a balm for creaky doors. Believers say that we’re the creeps. Using free will, we overused the gifts of Mr. or Ms. Intelligent design and fouled the environment, causing global warming. In our greed we went to war to conquer nations that by pure luck had the stuff under its soil, and to preserve our access to it, made sure the passages to oil were clear. Paul Thomas Anderson opens our eyes to another form of greed, one that existed, albeit enhanced by the imagination of novelist Upton Sinclair and partially adapted by writer-director Anderson: the avarice of an ambitious American to control as much oil-rich land in California and shipping access to that land as he could. Why? Because he wanted fancy clothes, trips to Europe, fine wines and fancy women? Not according to the film, “There Will Be Blood,” but simply because that’s the nature of capitalism: to have power for its own sake. Yet if novelist Upton Sinclair, whose most famous book, “Jungle,” depicted the miserable working conditions in the Chicago meatpacking sweatshops was a plea for an uprooting of our economic system in part propelled him to be the Social Party candidate for California governor, “There Will Be Blood” soft-pedals that writer’s fervent politics in favor of something else. Mr. Anderson is more interested in painting a portrait of the mixing of religion with business in the early decades of the last century, honing in on the small towns in a less sophisticated California where the search for black gold made a few people rich, most simply unlucky, and a the most unfortunate, dead. The central character, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), easily fills the screen as a psychopath, a capitalist in the most stereotypically lunatic sense—one who does not like people and seeks money as a way to barricade himself against them—without realizing that he is the most unlikable human being of all. The initial fifteen minutes of the film are virtually without dialogue and are among the most riveting, both literally and figuratively, as we in the audience hear little other than Jonny Greenwood’s electronic sound to create the mood. Daniel Plainview digs in 1898 for gold and silver, a backbreaking task that leaves at least one man dead but affords Daniel , who now has a child (whose mother died in childbirth), enough money to research the possibilities of oil in the area. Traveling with son while pretending to hunt for quail, he buys drilling rights, sets up derricks, hires men to do the dangerous work—all filmed in the area of Marfa Texas by Robert Elswit. This is macho land: executive do not live in Hiltons or Intercontinentals but in wooden shacks, the men padding down in tents. This is the territory of movies like “Giant.” (“No Country for Old Men” was filmed in the area as well.) Nor is there anything cushy about the job. There are no paper-pushing bureaucrats here or American reporters iin Baghdad who never leave the safety of the Green Zone. In one horrifying scene, a well blows up destroying the hearing of Plainview’s ten-year-old son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), who in the first major sign of Daniel’s psychosis is abandoned by his father as just so much extra baggage. In Daniel’s mind, a greater danger is competition—not from another industrialist, but from the town’s evangelical preacher and the son of a man whose land Daniel bought, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), who soon realizes that he and his dad were taken advantage of. Plainview single-handedly takes on the Standard Oil Company, which offers to buy him out and make him a rich man, but the final scene, which has the off-the-way Daniel confronting the preacher, evokes comparison between Daniel and the Coen Brothers’ creation, Anton Chigurh in “No Country for Old Men.” One comes away with the impression that money does not always yield happiness: sometimes it’s the root of both evil and psychosis. Critic David Thomson has said that “no other American director working today has such sad, tender, and smart ways of looking into the depths of society….Sooner or later, it will be perceived how desperately concerned he is about the society called America.” While Thomson wrote this in his “New Biographical Dictionary of Film” years before “There Will Be Blood” came out, he appears to say that we should look at Anderson’s film—which encompasses only the first one hundred fifth pages of Upton Sinclair novel—as a critique of American society today. Given the fear that some of us have of “socialized medicine,” are we too individualistic? Europeans appear to have no problems with the word “group” or even “socialistic,” which we look upon as dirty words, while Daniel Plainview, who has said that he hates people and looks to accumulate money to get as far away from people as he can, represents (granted) the most extreme form of individualism, of which most of us are not guilty but which is set up as the straw man, the logical conclusion of our beliefs. In the generous amount of time allotted to him, I wish Mr. Anderson had given us more of the political background of American during the period 1898-1927, marked principally by the inventions of the automobile, the airplane and, by the era of the Roaring Twenties and the tragedy of World War I. Also what are we to make of the small evangelical church and the members who so innocently followed the exorcism rituals of Eli Sunday—played with fervor by Paul Dano? Are these people yokels taken in by a slick Elmer Gantry salesman? Are they, per David Thomson’s statement above, people to be looked upon as sad, or as tender members of society? While the mostly fine film, boosted by Jonny Greenwood’s awards-likely electronic music, has moments of mind-blowing power, it lacks the coherence of steady dramatic momentum in addition to being closed off from events in the greater society. Other than its microcosm of American society during the first quarter of the last century, it exists for the most part as a stage for the towering Daniel Day-Lewis, a man who takes acting seriously enough to refuse to wear a warm coat while filming “Gangs of New York” because “In the 19th Century they did not have such coats” and had to be given antibiotics to tone down his serious cold, and he spoke in character with the appropriate accent through the days and nights of that filming. Rated R. 158 minutes. © 2007 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
| 
