There Will Be Blood
Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love, Hard Eight) does more than tell stories: he uses stories to lay his characters bare, and uses the characters to explore what it is to be human. His films strike hard at times, but tend to have poignant undercurrents. His latest film, There Will Be Blood (based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!), has affirmed his status as a leading director of his generation.
Daniel Plainview, a successful oilman, goes from oil prospect to oil prospect, selling locals the same spiel: extolling the benefits, practically verbatim, that drilling for oil will confer upon their respective communities. Remarkably, it’s the sort of hollow spin that ambitious, power-hungry people use to this day.
Plainview has had to know a lot about people in order to manipulate them, and he can’t abide seeing anyone else succeed. So when he witnesses a local preacher proselytising, he sees a showman parading as a prophet, sensing that the preacher, too, is an ambitious man. The power struggle that ensues - between Plainview and the preacher, Plainview and others, and within Plainview himself - is gripping, despite being (at around two and a half hours), a rather long film.
The first part of the film, completely without dialogue, immerses us in the grimy, dangerous world of the oil business. Although we’re distanced further from it as the film progresses, the oil business leaves nobody unsullied.
Daniel Day-Lewis deservedly won an Oscar for his performance as Plainview. His character is replete with enigmatic contradictions: he’s charismatic, callus and contemplative, and, the sound of his voice, with its rumbling, trailing cadences, enhances his on-screen presence.
The original soundtrack, by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood (who, incidentally, was recently a composer-in-residence at the BBC) was intrusive and overly literal at first, but settled by the second half of the film, managing to complement it quite well. There’s also the most wonderful use of the Brahms Violin Concerto in D.
After watching this film, it’s difficult not to be confronted by the ugly nature of ambition, and the ultimate futility of greed. If one’s success comes at the expense of other people, why on earth do we strive for it? Upton Sinclair wrote his novel as a repudiation of capitalism, yet ambition, greed and exploitation exist in all cultures.
Plainview freely admits that he doesn’t see much good in people: could he be right, after all?