Blood-letting with Daniel Day-Lewis

New in theaters: The Eye, Over Her Dead Body, Strange Wilderness
New on DVD: The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, The Invasion, The Nines

There Will Be Blood, 2007’s most decorated film other than recent SAG Awards champ No Country For Old Men, finally opened in Baton Rouge last Friday at the new Perkins Rowe and Rave theaters.

Sounding like a cross between a Houston huckster and an old-line New England blue blood, Daniel Day-Lewis squints his eyes into darting diagonal slits, and winces, huffs, limps and explodes his way to disappearing into Daniel Plainview, the film’s incredibly flawed central figure. The crests and falls of writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s single-minded narrative ride on the wave of Plainview’s megalomania, greed and uncompromising self-centeredness. The film is riddled with allusions to consumption. And as Plainview’s gluttony for consuming “black gold” grows, his obsession, in turn, consumes him. He is Citizen Kane without a “Rosebud.” He is Ebenezer Scrooge who knows when to turn on the charm to get what he wants. And what he wants is oil.

The film begins with a wide shot of the Central California desert of 1898, drenched in Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s haunting score for strings. The film floats along for 20 minutes or so before the first dialogue is uttered as Plainview mines for silver, strikes oil for the first time and eventually adopts the infant son of a business partner who gets impaled in a mine shaft accident. As Plainview nestles the young baby on a train ride and looks into his eyes, it is the last shot we see of him with any type of humanity. His adoption of his “son and business partner H.W. Plainview,” turns out, like everything else he does, to be a cold, calculated business decision. A cute face in tow makes him look like a trustworthy family man, which in turn makes him more money.

“I have a competition in me,” Plainview says in a rare moment of self-examination and vulnerability. “I want no one else to succeed. I see the worst in people. I look at them and see nothing worth liking.” He might as well be talking about himself. The thrust of the film comes when Plainview spars with a local faith healer named Eli Sunday, played by Little Miss Sunshine’s Paul Dano. Sunday is the theatrical leader of a church in a small town that sits on an oil reserve. He turns out to be as unscrupulous and egotistical as Plainview. Spanning a couple decades in its nearly three-hour run time, the film examines how both men compromise their souls for the amassing of oil, money and power. In a broader sense the film poses questions all too relevant to our modern context. To what lengths do big businesses, churches, government and we go to attain oil, money and power? What is the cost? The easy answer is the obvious prophecy of the film’s title: There will be blood!

For his part, Anderson gives Day-Lewis, Dano and the supporting cast room to breathe and to exist as their characters. Never once does he choke a performance with quick cuts or editing tricks. The pace is slow and deliberate and engrossing. My favorite scene had to be when the oil derrick explodes into flames. As his workers run around trying to stamp out the 30-foot blow torch that’s streaking into the twilight sky, Plainview stands covered in the slick, hunched over with a strange grin on his face and fire dancing in his eyes. He watches the burning derrick like a latter-day hippie might watch Burning Man. He worships it. As he stands transfixed, he does not think about his worker who died earlier that day in the shaft, or his young son who was just thrown from the derrick and left in the barracks complaining of hearing loss. He is, as he constantly says, “an oilman.” He thinks only of the profits.
“What are you so worried about?” he asks his devastated-looking assistant with glee. “There’s a whole ocean of oil underneath our feet!”

I don’t know if There Will Be Blood is the best film of the year, but it is a masterful morality tale, history lesson and character study that should not be missed.