Drawing Blood

Daniel Day-Lewis epic refuses to be a simple morality play, which bodes well for a future legacy as a classic

By Philip Martin

Craggy, raw and brawny, P.T. Anderson's epic-feeling but tightly focused There Will Be Blood is the most likely movie from 2007's bumper crop to be remembered 100 years from now. It may not win an Academy Award (though its star, the inimitable Daniel Day-Lewis, is an almost-prohibitive favorite for Best Actor) but it has the aura of a classic, a Treasure of the Sierra Madre - or Citizen Kane for the 21st century. It is a consensus masterpiece.

Movie

There Will Be Blood

91

Rating: R

Length: 2 hours, 38 minutes

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But there's something a little too easy about calling it a masterpiece and ticking off the myriad allusions to American (and American movie) history the film makes. Like Todd Haynes, Anderson is a terrifically specific, original filmmaker who has always worn his DVD collection on his sleeve. His Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love could be read as extended homages to, respectively, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and Jonathan Demme, with touches borrowed from Jean-Luc Godard, Hal Ashby and Michelangelo Antonioni.

So while There Will Be Blood is in some ways Anderson's most straightforward and traditional film, it may also be his most original. Though there are plenty of seeded references - everything from My Left Foot to Giant to Chinatown to Days of Heaven - for the movie buffs to check off, there's nothing insidery or obscure about There Will Be Blood. In fact, it might not be too much to say that if you don't like this movie, you don't like movies.

Based on the first half of Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, Blood begins with the visceral image of Day-Lewis as a turn-of-the-20th-century miner digging for silver at the bottom of a deep shaft. Before the first word of dialogue is spoken, nearly 20 minutes into the film, this miner suffers a devastating injury, serendipitously discovers oil in his mine, assembles a crew and brings in a well, loses a colleague in a brutal accident, adopts the dead man's young son and grows medium-rich.

We flash forward a few years and the boy has become his constant companion and something of a sales prop as the miner turned wildcatter seeks to secure leases. Only now do we learn the man's name is Daniel Plainview, and that he's ambitious, driven to find oil and to get richer.

Sinclair based the protagonist of Oil! (whom he called Joe Ross) on Edward Doheny, the Los Angeles oil tycoon who in his late career became one of the central figures in the Teapot Dome scandal. (Los Angeles' Doheny Drive is named for him.) Day-Lewis' performance is also informed by John Huston's turn as Noah Cross in Chinatown. But Anderson stays clear of the leftist politics that turn Sinclair's novel into a screed. This Plainview would sooner cut a politician's throat than bribe him. His avarice is personal, not emblematic of an American type.

In the film's central confrontation, Plainview buys an oil lease from the family of young charismatic preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), who shares a surname with old kerosene-circuit preacher Billy Sunday, but seems modeled on charlatan evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. Plainview and Eli develop a curious symbiosis - they're both bad men who find each other useful at times.

Day-Lewis is simply sensational as the oddly nihilist Plainview, a man whose bitterness is never explained. Plainview is a more taciturn version of Al Swearingen portrayed by Ian McShane in the HBO series Deadwood, though without the poetry or the redeeming submerged humanism. Plainview is too mean, too suspicious of kindness to offer a Rosebud-like clue to the source of his misanthropy.

He ends up alone, and the final inevitable confrontation arrives like a jolting black joke. There Will be Blood refuses to become a simple morality play. Like No Country For Old Men, it acknowledges the existence of monsters without supplying the audience with comforting bromides. This is a strong movie, with extraordinary visual power and the unsettling ambiguity of genuine art.