There Will Be Blood

With There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson enters the pantheon of great film directors. Although this is an American film, and tells a story that perhaps could only be told in America, Blood is a film with literary aspirations, one that speaks to many people and tells many different stories.

Though the film is dedicated to Robert Altman, Anderson has already made his homage to Altman. That was Magnolia, a sprawling, engaging, but not always coherent film about the random, often invisible threads that connect us all. Blood, by way of contrast, is a film about a willful severing of all those threads, an abandonment of all that one man perceives is preventing him from achieving enough power to remove himself from society.

In this and many other regards, the film reminded me most of Stanley Kubrick's work. That is not to suggest that this film is derivative. (It is certainly not as derivative as, say, Magnolia.) Where Kubrick's alienated characters are often contrasted by opulent or overwhelming environments--the grand hotel of The Shining, the palace rooms and battlefields of Barry Lyndon or Paths of Glory, or the planet Jupiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey--the characters or, more precisely, character of There Will Be Blood is surrounded by an environment that is just as bleak, lifeless, and uninviting as his own heart. To his credit, Anderson's director of photography, Robert Elswit, does nothing to pretty up the oil fields and isolated towns of the film's milieu. Even the Pacific Ocean ends up looking like a wading pool, an all-too-miniscule oasis in an otherwise uncompromising land.

The film's lead character, Daniel Plainview, brilliantly and harshly portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis, is similarly barren. "There are times," he states in an isolated confessional moment, "when I look at people and see nothing worth liking." As the film progresses, we watch Plainview abandon nearly all of the pretenses (what we might call "social niceties" or, more directly, "humanity") that have helped him become an extremely rich man. In the end, we are left with a character who loves no one but himself, and even that may be a misguided assumption on our part. But at no moment does Day-Lewis fail to be anything but absorbing. His is a frightening, disturbing portrayal, and I can't think of another actor who would dare play a character as singularly unredeeming as Daniel Plainview. One is reminded of his Bill the Butcher in Scorsese's Gangs of New York, but even Bill had a rougish gleam about him, if only during his rousing speeches of racial hatred. Plainview has no such gleam, nor does Day-Lewis ever wink at the audience to reassure us that Plainview should not be judged too harshly.

There are many possible ways to interpret the film, which is one of its many strengths. It is perhaps too pat to say that the film reflects whatever light the audience shines on it, but I found myself considering, at various points during its 2 1/2 hour length, issues relating to America's claim to moral strength and how such attitudes were able to develop, the seemingly eternal yet ultimately futile struggle humans endure between faith and material comfort, the need for men to place themselves above their presumed subordinates, the desire men have to place themselves beyond issues of family while still craving its societal securities, and why our culture finds such men--even men as ethically impoverished as Plainview--to be prime candidates for leadership roles. This last theme, of course, led me to think of Bush and Cheney, their own ethical bankruptcy, and the tremendous pit they have dug for us, our children, and the reputation of our nation.

I don't want to suggest that this is an overtly politicized film, for Bush and Cheney are merely the latest insidious endpoint for trends in our culture that had their origin, as the film suggests, in the industrialization of America, specifically by means of oil development and the greed any similarly-scaled endeavour naturally engenders. Even Eli Sunday, the film's second most prominent character, a man of "faith", cannot escape the demands and expectations of America's quest for power. Plainview and Sunday engage in a increasingly personal battle of wills, one which instills them both with the need to humiliate each other, particularly in two scenes which are among the most disturbing and emotionally wrenching moments I have seen in recent films, scenes that left me trembling.

There are many other aspects of the film that are worth discussing, which only serve to remind me that so few films these days are worth discussing in anything but the most obvious narrative terms. This is a film that sticks on you, much like the blood and oil that coats the bodies of the men killed in Plainview's wells, or the cloth crosses stuck on the hearts of the ignorant settlers who think that either Plainview or Sunday will redeem their miserable lives. This is a film that you will take with you outside the theatre as you contemplate the casual indignities of the housing crisis, or the cynicism of a president who uses torture and lies as a means of personal enrichment, or the promise of a candidate who dares to offer hope, rather than anger, as a way to empowerment. The film offers little in the way of hope or optimism for our curiously mythologized assumptions about power and its consequences. What it does offer, as we approach what may be a way off of the dark path we've been led down these last seven years, is a time to reflect--in the dark, among strangers--whether our national myths are based on anything other than the callous self-interest of hateful men.

******

Though it is perhaps the most deserving, this is not the kind of film that wins the Academy Award for Best Picture. Anderson may get a nod for his direction, but this is a hard film to celebrate, at least in terms of the self-congratulatory tone of the Oscars, the very tone, ironically, on which the film turns its cold, uncompromising eye. Don't let that stop you from seeing it, as soon as possible.