1 of 4
Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is to generic movies as Mt. Everest is to an anthill: it towers over what we ordinarily regard as an entertainment. One of our most quirky, ingenious, and religiously steeped filmmakers, Anderson has crafted a dark work of enduring power that features one of the great defining performances in the history of film, Daniel Day-Lewis' Daniel Plainview. Nothing in Anderson's previous work quite prepares us for this. Certainly there are hints in Magnolia, with its themes of redemption, revenge, and forgiveness—notable, in part, for Tom Cruise's brilliant performance in a supporting role. But all the players are superb, especially the inimitable John C. Reilly, whose performance is steeped in a pathos that never turns banal. The interlocking stories of Magnolia conclude with a torrential downpour of … frogs! When I saw the film in a theater in Chicago, there were murmurs of perplexity from exiting filmgoers. "Like, what the hell was the frog thing about?", I overheard one fellow say, a statement objectionable for two reasons: first, the ubiquitous, distracting, and slightly demented repetition of "like"; second, the illustration of complete biblical ignorance. Ever hear of the plagues Moses called down on the Pharoah and Egypt?
As brilliant as Magnolia was, it seems a confection next to There Will Be Blood. Martin Luther told us that a "lonely man always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst," a quote that Hannah Arendt favored; for her, it illustrated the mindset of totalitarian ideologues as well as psychopaths. Daniel Plainview is one of Luther's lonely men, a brilliant, driven, stricken person who rivets us in his prime, then enthralls and repels us as we witness his descent into bitter, despairing, alcohol-driven isolation.
I suspect that filmgoers will either be put off or irresistibly drawn into the film from its opening moments. We see Daniel Plainview alone in the bowels of the earth pickaxing an unforgiving wall of rock. We hear jarring, discordant music. We notice at one point that the music has stopped. We hear only the sound of Plainview's ax and his labored breathing. (Note should be made here of the extraordinary soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood, blessedly free from the lugubrious, over-produced "wall of sound" annoyance so typical of most films. Greenwood's score deserves every possible accolade as one of the most inventive and scalp-tingling ever composed.) The year is 1898. Daniel labors, suffers a broken-leg, patches himself up, works despite the pain. We do not hear the sound of a human voice for the film's first 17 minutes by my estimate. The next scenes take place in 1902, then 1911. Plainview presents himself with his young son, H.W. The remainder of the film is a tale of Plainview's success and his horrific descent—but, oh my, how Anderson, who also wrote the script, and Day-Lewis tell it!
In Plainview's story we see illustrated what Alexis de Tocqueville identified as the dark side of the coin of American freedom and equality, namely, isolation: we are apart from one another, all the insinuating strands that once linked us having unraveled. In large part, Plainview's tragedy is that he needs other people the way an addict needs a fix: to triumph over, to kick in the balls (sorry, crude but necessary), to bury, all too literally at one turning point. "I look at people and I see nothing worth liking," Plainview opines. He also avers that "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed," words proffered to Henry Plainview, whom Daniel believes to be a long-lost half-brother. Even the mere existence of others in the oil business tears him up. He would be an Emperor who reigns over a desert denuded of life, for he must drive out all others in order to be assured of his own triumph.
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