Greed, arrogance, maliciousness, religion, oil, and the American dream. P.T. Anderson's epic tale of moral disintegration features another ferocious, Oscar-worthy performance from Daniel Day-Lewis.
Read Jerry P's full review (including spoilers) in the Bookmans Forum.
Paul Thomas Anderson, the writer and director of There Will Be Blood, wisely chose Daniel Day-Lewis to play Daniel Plainview, the misanthropic oilman and self-made multimillionaire who establishes a personal empire on the golden hills of Southern California in the first quarter of the 20th century. There Will Be Blood charts Plainview’s beginnings as a silver miner, his move to the oil business, his success at it, and his disintegration as a man - the bleeding out of his sanity and humanity.
Anderson adapted his story from Oil!, a muckraking novel written in the 1920s by Upton Sinclair. There are two major strands to Anderson’s plot: a focus on Plainview’s life in the oil business and how he treats people, and his war against religion as embodied by a Holy Roller preacher he encounters in California, and whom he contends with over a matter of years. As Moby Dick is full of the details of the whaling business, there is the same kind of attention to the oil business in this film, with the additional aspect of Plainview’s dealings with the local population, which are not always above board. As a capitalist, he is a bit of a horse thief. He is also a loner with an overwhelming phobia: he can’t abide love and wants nothing to do with it. He resembles Geoffrey Firmin, the main character of Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano, who had the same problem, and Firmin was an alcoholic as Plainview is too. While traveling in Mexico, Firmin saw a sign that said, “There is no excuse for not loving.” The saying haunts Firmin throughout Volcano, and it is a truism that Plainview disregarded a long time ago. He’s beyond the pale when it comes to love and treating people decently.
One notices right away that there are no women in the story, except for some females in the local population. None, zip. Intimacy isn’t Plainview's cup of tea; it is his great enemy. Making money and building an empire are the only things of any consequence to him, and he marshals all of his energies in that direction. He is also capable of extreme behavior, as if he is, morally speaking, not subject to the normal conventions of responsibility. In his world, [this behavior is] perfectly acceptable, something he has to do to preserve his self-image as the hard-assed individualist.
He clashes with Eli Sunday, the Holy Roller preacher, who, like Plainview, is also a self-created creature; they are so much alike they have to battle each other for supremacy, neither giving quarter to the other. There are six scenes in the movie featuring volcanic eruptions of special drama and intensity and three of them deal with the clash between the two antagonists - fundamentalist religion versus godless materialism, a typically modern confrontation. The oilman regards religion as a ridiculous superstition, and his impatience and wrath towards Sunday eventually explodes. Paul Dano, the silent brother in last year’s surprise hit, Little Miss Sunshine, plays the Sunday twins, Paul and Eli, and does a superb job, providing a good foil for Plainview’s passionate negation. Dano’s rather pasty-faced countenance and reed-like body are perfect for the odd brothers with their old time religion background.
When I first heard Plainview speak, I knew he was imitating someone’s speech patterns. I finally remembered who: John Houston, particularly the way he spoke in Chinatown. I did some checking and it turns out that Anderson wanted the oilman to sound like that. Day-Lewis spent some time learning Houston’s rather unique speech patterns. It works well with Plainview’s character. It is a portentous voice that he uses to sell the locals on cooperating with him as he buys up land or gains mineral rights to the “ocean of oil” under the hilly desert. He gives one speech to a crowd about how his plans will issue in civilization, churches, schools, homes, and all the rest of it. He uses the phrase “share the wealth” but he has no intention of doing that. Not only is he mean-spirited, he’s greedy as hell.
An association that came up as I watched the movie is Citizen Kane, and I think that is deliberate on Anderson’s part, as Daniel Plainview and Charles Foster Kane are woven from the same cloth, although Kane simply fails in love where Plainview keeps it at arm’s length throughout his life. But both amass fortunes and represent capitalism's hard-edged tendencies. Both end up badly.
Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance is superlative, and if doesn’t win the Oscar for Best Actor something is seriously wrong. Since Plainview likes to say, “I don’t like to explain myself," Day-Lewis has to be transparent on the nonverbal level, in body language, facial gestures and emotive outbreaks. He has to maintain a ferocious temperament throughout the film and he never flags on his input of energy.
My wife heard some women in the bathroom talking about the film after it ended. All three thought it was awful. One said, “How could any reviewer give this movie a 4 star rating? That oilman was so mean and evil. I don’t know why anybody would want to see a movie about him.” Easy, ladies, easy: the movie tells a great truth, that no one can live without love. Those who try end up raving on “Desolation Row” like King Lear.
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