At the heart of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film lies a towering performance from Daniel Day Lewis. His Daniel Plainview is an all-American monster – a pioneer oilman whose determination to succeed in his chosen profession, sweeps all other considerations before it like an overwhelming tide.
Plainview is quite frankly loathsome – a man prepared to lie and cheat and steal his way to the top of its game and it’s amazing that Day Lewis manages to capture an audience as effectively as he does. Already garlanded with a Best Actor Oscar, it’s easy to see what won over the voters. We really ought to hate Plainview and want to see him fail, but something in Day Lewis’s performance is so mesmerising that, despite everything, we end up rooting for the man.
If Plainview’s smooth cultured tones are familiar, then they ought to be. Day Lewis is channelling John Huston here. Close your eyes for a moment and you could be listening to an audio clip from Chinatown. If Plainview has a film equivalent it would be James Dean’s Jet Rink in Giant – but whereas Rink at least had the motivation of unrequited love, Plainview has no such saving graces. There’s not an intimation that anybody or anything in his life has ever got beneath his diamond hard exterior. At one point, we hear him announce that he ‘doesn’t like people’ and has worked all his life so he can get away from them.
Spanning some thirty years, the story follows Plainview’s early attempts to grub silver out of the soil, then his first realization of the potential there is in oil. We see him take on H.W, the orphaned child of a dead workmate, not from any altruistic motive, but because he realises that the presence of a cute child will help him win the rights to large tracts of land. But when he attempts to acquire the land of the godfearing Sunday family he comes into opposition with Eli (Paul Dano), a devout young preacher with messianic qualities. Both men see each other as frauds and a rivalry develops between them that will have tragic consequences…
In all the hoo hah about Day Lewis, it would be easy to overlook Paul Thomas Anderson’s contribution. In Boogie Nights and Magnolia, this young director has already given us two of the greatest independent movies of the last fifty years; and while Punch Drunk Love was a definite misstep, it wasn’t quite the hopeless debacle it was made out to be, despite the presence of the odious Adam Sandler. If There Will Be Blood occasionally sets out its stall for Uncle Oscar a little too obviously, it’s nonetheless a great achievement. Witness the first 25 minutes or so, where not one line of dialogue is uttered and it’s evident that you’re seeing the work of a director at the peak of his powers. There Will Be Blood may not be anybody’s idea of ‘a nice night out at the pictures’ but it’s first rate cinema that deserves every bit of its success.
