There will be blood. You bet there will be.
“There Will Be Blood.” You bet there will be – metaphorical, emotional, and
actual blood. The movie builds relentlessly on its own unpleasantness until we
want to scream, or at the very least, to strangle Daniel Day Lewis. This fine
actor, with measured tones and a certain formality, covers his role with a
theatrical veneer that seems an odd conceit for the California oil days of the
early 1900s. He overwhelms the movie with his performance until we watch him
instead of the story.
Daniel
Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an angry brute infected by a viral fusion of
narcissism and greed, a man so self absorbed that he hates all people and wants
to know no one. His self-hatred literally eats him away until he becomes a
victim of his own brutality. He is mad, it seems clear, from the first scene
forward.
This is a man
clawing at the soil in his search for oil. Finding it, (in 1902), he improvises
primitive wooden tools to build the tower that will usher his strike into the
sky. With his young son by his side to pave his way to buying up ranches for the
oil beneath them, Daniel builds his oil fields, his pipeline, and his fortune
leaving a string of victims in his path.
Daniel rids
himself of the people he meets with such dispatch that only one other character
is fully fleshed out. This is Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), an evangelist preacher
whose family falls victim to Daniel’s greed. Eli is Daniel’s equal in sick
nastiness, and throughout the movie the two trade moments of sadistic revenge.
Neither is to be trusted for a moment. If we didn’t sense this for ourselves,
the score tells us so. The innovative electronic music, by Jonny Greenwood of
Radiohead, drills itself into our heads for well over two hours – an
announcement that there will be no redemption in this movie.
In most
portraits of naked ambition and greed, the protagonist interacts at least with
lovers or competitors. Not here. Daniel simply sweeps away ordinary men and
beats the big ones (Standard Oil) at the bargaining table. This is a man who
knows he will hate every person he meets. “I want no one else to succeed. I
don’t like people.” Both the oil driller and the preacher are madmen without
redeeming features. There is no doubt that they deserve each other.
Be assured
that the movie has been written and directed with great skill and imagination by
Paul Thomas Anderson. Filmed in near darkness and scored to spook us, it is a
strange concoction. There is no subtlety or complexity in Daniel Day Lewis’s one
note role. The big question is whether you really want to see a portrait of
unrelieved mental illness created by a good actor who has immersed himself
thoroughly in a character he loves playing. Unfortunately, he seems to love it
to the point of self-indulgence.
Copyright (c) Illusion