Review: There Will Be Blood

It was lit­tle more than a decade ago that a young P.T. Anderson com­pleted a video scene at the Sundance lab that showed not only promise, but genius. The result­ing Sydney, which would be renamed Hard Eight gained Mr. Anderson enough recog­ni­tion to be given rel­a­tively free reign at New Line Cinema to make Boogie Nights, all the while retain­ing and grow­ing his tal­ented cabal of cre­ative geniuses. You know most of them: actors Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly, and Philip Seymour Hoffman among oth­ers; direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy Robert Elswit; and com­poser Jon Brion. There are oth­ers, but the pre­vi­ous list rep­re­sents those whose careers sky­rock­eted in sync with this American auteur.

 

Why the his­tory les­son? Because, save for Robert Elswit’s gor­geous pho­tog­ra­phy, all of the usual sus­pects are notice­ably (and thank­fully) miss­ing from Paul Thomas Anderson’s lat­est film, There Will Be Blood. Like so many younger American film­mak­ers, he has walked the line between being an artist and a rock star. It’s not so hard to see why. His films all deal with Los Angeles, fame, drugs, vio­lence, mas­culin­ity and that con­coc­tion of all that is good and evil, The American Dream. But ever since the gar­gan­tuan suc­cess of Boogie Nights, Mr. Anderson has retracted into his own thoughts for fear of mak­ing the wrong movie, and we as an audi­ence have to suf­fer for it. It’s been five years since he made Punch Drunk Love, which was four years after Magnolia. Who knows the next time we’ll see his name in lights.

But any­way, let’s deal with the film at hand.From frame one, you may think you walked into the the­ater and ended up in a screen­ing of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Much like that clas­sic, this film starts at the begin­ning of time, at least for our hero, Daniel Day-Lewis, played with much gusto by oil mag­nate Daniel Plainview (not a typo, he’s just that damn good!). We find Mr. Plainview silently search­ing for riches in the California desert much like our hairy ances­tors did in Kubrick’s clas­sic. Immediately, ten­sion is built in a way we haven’t seen on screen in a long time. I’d like to make a Hitchcock ref­er­ence, but this is some­thing dif­fer­ent. Between the stark pho­tog­ra­phy, com­mit­ted per­for­mance, tight edit­ing, and mind-bendingly fit­ting score, the audi­ences expec­ta­tions are imme­di­ately bent to exhaus­tion until they break. After this first scene, you can be sure that the title will deliver and there will, in fact, be blood.

We move on to fol­low the life of our enter­pris­ing Ahab as he con­tin­ues to dig for oil across the Golden State, no longer the scrappy ape we first meet at the begin­ning. The story picks up when a boy shows up to tell of a town so full of oil that the stuff just comes up through the ground, and our hero decides he has found his white whale. You know the rest of the story already, for a man who lusts after riches will have trou­ble con­tin­u­ing to be a man. But of course, this film is not really about plot all that much. Mr. Anderson is known for his lengthy char­ac­ter stud­ies, and this