Director P.T. Anderson’s recent contributions to American film have been described a lot of ways. Quirky for Magnolia’s climax of raining frogs, or Adam Sandler’s cross country trek to tell a sleazy mattress salesman to stop harassing him in Punch Drunk Love. Oldtimey grit, Upton Sinclair and California’s desert prairies would never be a guess for Anderson’s next cinematic meditation, but he has arrived at a new vocabulary that eschews high paced urban madness for a slower ticking clock.
Loosely based on Sinclair’s “Oil!”, Daniel Day Lewis stars as a calculating oil man Daniel Plainview at the turn of the century. Sharing “The Jungle”s historic aversion to romanticizing early American labor, There Will Be Blood reveals the oil industry in its infancy crashing along in a manner as coarse and dangerous as the men doing it. Accidents are frequent and ghastly as heavy machine parts sometimes fall into wells upon unsuspecting workers. Anderson handles the tragedies as unflinchingly as his character Plainview, taking long dark shots of monotonous work interrupted by the frank clanging of metal pieces descending on someone’s head. Plainview only shrugs it off with a “Goddamn it….. shut down until the midday.”
The only spice augmenting the greedy sense of chaos is Johnny (Radiohead) Greenwood’s avant score that is heavy on grinding discord from the string section. Greenwood’s score is an odd fit, but a perfect one. The film opens with a sudden burst of orchestral drone as the camera confronts a bare Californian hill as if it were the monolith from Kubrick’s 2001. The soundtrack becomes more frantic and percussive as Plainview buys up property, swindles small towners and confronts his arch enemy: a young evangelist preacher named Eli Sunday (Paul Dano).
The film takes a measured pace, building tensions between an entrepreneur and a fundamentalist. Anderson adeptly gives the audience time to soak up the meaning of their conflict without narrating it in your face by showing the men doing business, and pausing to let you soak up their barren backdrop. As Lewis brilliantly deadpans his character to the point of emotional crumbling, and Dano fervently leads a congregation in a fire-and-brimstone condemnation of sin, we begin to see There Will Be Blood depositing a new chapter in Americana. It’s a chapter filled with battle between an old way of life and a new one; between backwoods Calvinism and capitalist ambition.
The story leaves little room for a classic protagonist. Both Plainview and Sunday are morally corrupt in their own regard. Plainview considers abandoning his adopted son when he becomes handicapped in a drilling accident. Sunday beats his own father for what he considers to be sinful stupidity at the error of selling Plainview an oil rich plot. As the two become more twisted in their respective battles the movie breaks up the tension with black humor of an entirely original tone. At one point Plainview beats Sunday for demanding money. The fight is humorously schoolyard-esque with Sunday screaming and Plainview pushing his head into the mud, but all the laughs come laced with wincing as both characters seem so close to insanity.
The movie is lengthly in considering the ultimately tragic fates of its twisted characters and pays off with a shocking climax that satisfies the titles promise. When all is done the film closes feeling worthy of canonization with so many famous American pictures that reveal the country’s turbulent nature. While people like Scorsese, Stone, Coppola and Leone are heralded for confronting the seedy underbelly of American crime and war, now Anderson can be remembered for showing the bloody trail of American business.
*****
