P. T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood

[Warning: You may not want to read this review if you have not seen the film.]

Something of great significance—a gesture with much power and thematic resonance—occurs early on in P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Daniel Plainview, iron-willed hard-scrabble oil prospector, slathered in the raw gore of his trade, picks up the just-orphaned son of an oil worker killed during the digging of a well shaft and smears a black daub of crude oil onto the infant’s forehead. With such a gesture, Plainview, some kind of prophet of the oil industry at the turn of the last century, baptizes his just-adopted son into a new religion. This moment—imbued with all the articulated grace that Anderson and his formidable star, Daniel Day-Lewis, possess—communicates with the viewer viscerally. It is one of many great moments in this film, but perhaps in its simplicity and humanity the most profound. It is certainly the most hopeful.

This moment exemplifies the thematic elements at the core of There Will Be Blood, which is loosely based on Upton Sinclair's Oil! In addition to being a family drama (minus the family, more or less), There Will Be Blood does something rarely seen in American film: it perfectly explicates the two impulses that founded our nation and sees them out to their logical conclusion. Of course, the Enlightenment-influenced revolutionaries of the late-eighteenth century founded our government. But the Puritans who preceded them set the cultural standard that has persisted to this day, and they operated on two drives: religious extremism and capitalism. Over time, these elements became sometimes isolated and even set at odds against each other. Both of these factors are at work in There Will Be Blood, separated out but still insinuating themselves within and around each other, their volatile equilibrium threatening to give way. Although Daniel Plainview displays an open contempt for the rampant Pentecostal Protestantism that grips many of the people around him, he is not by any means a godless character. A different kind of enthusiasm--an entirely more terrestrial one--possesses him. The rituals of the oil economy are the binding ties of his church.

Plainview proselytizes in evenly measured, plainspoken terms when he comes to a new town to deliver his pitch about how he is the best man to take control of their underground resources. He is convincing enough, knowledgeable in his trade, perhaps even a fair trader early on. But Plainview is near monomaniacal in his drive, of the same ilk as Captain Ahab; a landlubber, however, Plainview is perhaps closer to Thomas Sutpen from William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! When Plainview buys out parcel after parcel of land to pursue his ambition of building a pipeline to the Pacific Ocean, we come to see Manifest Destiny acted out in miniature. This makes There Will Be Blood achieve a kind of American-ness in a way that Moby Dick achieves only metaphorically. America is about geography. Sutpen understands that, and Plainview understands it as well. For Plainview, it is not enough to merely own the land--he has to suck it dry. Still, the similarities to Melville obtain, and the image of oil-men washing their hands in crude oil in this film seems clearly to allude to the crew of the Pequod washing their hands in spermacetti oil.

The primary threat to Plainview's livelihood is initially the earth itself: it takes a good bit of work to get that bubbling crude started, and once it spouts the stuff can hardly be contained. This is man versus the elements. A new threat emerges, however, to counter Plainview's hold on the ground: the threat is not religion itself but rather one particular minister, whose ambition rivals that of Plainview himself. Along parallel lines, Day-Lewis's spectacular performance as Plainview is almost upstaged at times by the antics of Paul Dano, who plays not only the preacher Eli Sunday but also (briefly) Eli's brother Paul. The twinness comes to full effect only at the end of the film, when prophet becomes confused with profit, and we are given a clearer vision of how things truly are. (In fact, I wasn't sure that "Paul" was not simply an alias that Eli used until I saw both names listed separately in the credits.) Eli is an excellent raver, and the scene in which he performs an inspired act of faith-healing upon an old woman is, as Plainview puts it afterward when paying respects to the preacher, "a goodamn hell of a show."

The central conflict then that takes over the story is that between Plainview and Sunday--between capitalism and religious extremism, that is--and the central scene of the film is Plainview's reluctant baptism into the church. Sunday wants Plainview for his church--and he wants Plainview's money for his church. Plainview clearly regards it all as superstition, but Sunday gets his way. Plainview wants land; church members own it. Sunday cannot take Plainview's soul--it seems that he might not have one--but he can get what he wants, which is a nice show in front of the congregation. This is one of the few well-lit scenes in the film, the light provided by an open-air window in the shape of a cross behind Sunday's alter. Plainview's baptism is real and fake at the same time, an honest but forced statement of his transgressions, a washing in the light and in clean water--not oil, for once. Plainview clearly isn't saved.
The emotional core of the film--since Plainview's emotive range is so clearly limitied--is Plainview's adoptive son, H.W. The relationship between father and son is the only thing that humanizes this driven man in a way that enables us to identify with him. H.W. (Dillon Freasier) is taciturn to begin with, eager to assist his father, and (especially in context--he doesn't have much competition) altogether endearing. His interaction with Eli's little sister Mary is the only touch of romance, innocent as it is, in an otherwise nearly sexless film. When H.W. loses his hearing in an oil derrick eruption and subsequently starts to act out on his frustrations, the viewer becomes distraught, not only out of sympathy for H.W. but also because we know that he is the only thing keeping Plainview at bay. The question is whether the adoptive bond is strong enough to withhold the scalding mania that Plainview holds inside his head.

What does Daniel Plainview want? To some extent, this question cannot be answered. Anderson's film is remarkable in part for its retroactive perspective. Plainview forcefully and accurately embodies the attitudes behind turn-of-the-century Realism, and as such he is a pre-Freudian creature who does not know or even wish to know the forces that drive him so relentlessly. One thing that is clear, though, is that he--again, like Thomas Sutpen--wants family. More accurately, perhaps, he feels the absence of it, and true to the title there is a growing, parasitic suspicion in Plainview's mind that if there is not blood between kin there is not kin. This suspicion seems to take over at the end, and when Plainview disowns H.W., we see the worst in him. Plainview is too devoid of tenderness, it seems, to marry and father his own offspring, or for that matter even to consort with the employees of a brothel when he briefly finds himself in one.

The film includes one lamentable aesthetic mistake, aside from any objections we might have to the film's ending. Plainview’s killing of a man who claimed to be his brother—and who got away with it for some time—is distracting. Yes, Plainview felt more than cheated—he was wounded to the core by the very theme that afflicts him throughout the film, his lack of family. He has no blood ties to anyone else in the film, it turns out. In essence, though, the problem here is that this act detracts from the viewer's focus: we wait for fall-out, but none ever comes. Perhaps the lack of reaction merely shows that Plainview can commit murder and then never let it trouble him again. This act diminishes the impact of the things around it, though. It is clear a few moments earlier that Plainview determines that the man is a fake. There might be better reactions here that don't disturb the narrative momentum so much. This is the only verifiable moment when Anderson shows a lack of appreciation for the value of subtlety in this film. Sometimes understatement is better, which is a lesson that few American filmmakers seem to understand. Otherwise, though, in this film, it is a lesson that P. T. Anderson has mastered, taking in as he does the colors, the landscapes, and the subdued pacing of Hollywood's maverick directors of the 1970s.

The end of the film marks a major shift in tone, from elegiac American realism a la Terrence Malick to a Scorcese-esque grotesquerie of violence. The shift may be a mis-step, but once the new tone is set, it is consistently developed, at least, and artfully executed.

The big question that the film leaves us with is this: What's next for P.T. Anderson? (Another question is what's next for Day-Lewis, who makes few films but is, for my money, the best performer making the rounds these days.) To say that this film is something of a departure for Anderson is understatement. Not that earlier films such as Hard Eight or Boogie Nights were bad, but there is nothing in them that suggests that Anderson had a film like this inside of his head waiting to get out. Though There Will Be Blood might stop just shy of indelible classic, it is a powerful cinematic endeavor. If Anderson persists with films on par with this one--which achieves a kind of timelessness in its universality--legends will emerge. What did Shakespeare do in the 1580s? What did Robert Johnson, who had been a lackluster guitarist in his earlier days, do to acquire his masterful mature style? Story has it that Johnson made a pact with the devil. Anderson's devil is Daniel Plainview. Let's hope that they keep dealing.