There Will Be Blood - out now
Directed, written and produced by Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood is loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!. This masterful epic, spanning the first three decades of the twentieth century, centres on the loathsome and unflinching silver miner-cum-oilman Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a man driven entirely by greed and his hatred of people (“I look at people and I see nothing worth liking”), who will go to any measures to stifle all competition.
The film opens with a 15 minute wordless sequence in which Plainview is seen toiling as a silver-miner. On the basis of a tip-off from a visitor named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), Plainview travels with his adoptive son to the town of Little Boston, California, where the Sunday family home is brimming with oil.
Under false pretences, Plainview buys the land off Paul’s father, Abel, for a pittance, but is challenged by Paul’s younger brother Eli (also Dano), a charismatic preacher and alleged faith healer, who later becomes Plainview’s nemesis. A series of events lead to Plainview, a totally irreligious man, being baptized into Eli’s Church of the Third Revelation, in exchange for some land that belongs to the church. At the same time Eli is exposed as a false healer who is motivated more by ambition and vanity than by a genuine fear of the Lord.
Daniel Day-Lewis gives possibly the most exhilarating performance of his career as he presents a terrifying portrait of immeasurable greed. Despite his almost inhuman capacity for evil, Plainview makes us see our own tendencies in his character as he enacts the terrifying flip-side of the American Dream. His murderous ambition combined with his ability to smooth-talk his way into the most deceptive deals make him truly devilish. At every turn this film brings to mind Jesus’ words “what good is it to a man to gain the whole world but forfeit his own soul?”. The more money Plainview makes, the more his morals deteriorate. This is a parable of American ambition and excess.
The dissonant score, written by Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood, is entirely appropriate for a film of enmity and subversion, and, like Anderson’s uneasy screenplay, will stay with you long after you finish watching the movie. Not for the faint-hearted, this is an utterly compelling film which uncovers the darkness in the human soul.
