Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

There Will
Be Blood

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Daniel Day-Lewis is the Olivier of his generation.

But this is a double-edged sword. Olivier was of the British school of stage acting, where his bravura performances brought the house down, as they would on film. But they were mannered and studied and always like watching the most beautiful piece of clockwork. His later-in-life performances were actually well underrated, as the style of acting changed so dramatically post-Brando. There are few performances as memorable as Szell in Marathon Man or the ultimate sweet old scoundrel in A Little Romance or even his Van Helsing in Badham’s Dracula. His vocal work and precision sliced through the screen and hit home, even when it was something as wild as The Boys From Brazil or The Jazz Singer.

The classic story is of Olivier watching Dustin Hoffman’s self-manipulations to give a performance as a broken man in Marathon Man, causing Olivier to intone, “Why not try acting, my boy?”

Day-Lewis embraces the methods of Hoffman to his core… but in the end, his performances are still quite Olivier. Unlike the great actors of the method generations and beyond, you can feel Day-Lewis performing for you… pulling you in… daring you to look away, while the great naturalistic actors of the era, like Phillip Seymour Hoffman, just are and don’t ever seem to be aware or care whether you or the camera is there.

I love watching Day-Lewis do his thing. But in combination with Paul Thomas Anderson, a writer-director who has been truly remarkable in drawing out naturalistic performances from actors as superstarry as Burt Reynolds and Tom Cruise, the style are somewhat in conflict.

And that conflict offers the central trouble with Anderson’s latest, There Will Be Blood. It’s a great problem to have, but it is a problem that strikes right to the heart of the film, especially when DDL is so central to every moment of the movie.

The first act of There Will Be Blood offers the possibility that we are experiencing the next Citizen Kane, Days of Heaven, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Giant, and Chinatown all rolled into one singular vision unlike any we have ever seen from PTA. The cinematography is lushly coarse, as Robert Elswit soars to new heights that can only be weighted down by having to compete with himself for an Oscar versus his work in Michael Clayton. Jack Fisk’s production design is similarly worthy. We are in the middle of nowhere, which has never been so beautiful and so raw. We don’t know who Day-Lewis is playing yet, just that he is a solitary figure mining a solitary hole in the ground… relentlessly… without words… testing, pushing, trying.

I don’t want to get into the details – as always, you should experience them for yourselves – but in time, he evolves from apparently looking for gold or some other rock to finding oil and figuring out how to make himself into an oil man. So this man, who we come to know as Plainview, is not Kane, landing in a world he chooses to change with the power of inherited wealth to move him forward. Plainview is a truly self-made man.

Plainview is, it feels like, Noah Cross forty years before Chinatown. He is the kind of man who would fight to get to the top and come up with the most unbelievable grotesqueries to stay there. It seems Mr. Day-Lewis felt the same way as he is, in effect, doing a John Huston imitation through the course of the film. It’s not a dead-on imitation. He doesn’t lilt quite as dramatically. But I defy anyone to listen to any of his speeches in There Will Be Blood and not to find the gruff, aggressive, lyrical cadences of John Huston’s voice.

By the two hour mark, I was decidedly agitated by Anderson’s failure to simply hire Danny Huston to do this role. He would have, in my imagination, actually been better than Daniel Day-Lewis, because he, while embodying some of the same ticks, would have relaxed more into the role and other magic could have happened. In fact, this movie, which he isn’t in, and 30 Days of Night, which is an embarrassment except for him, suggest strongly to me that Danny Huston is now the most underrated, undervalued (by Hollywood) actor in America today.

But I digress…

The story moves along as Plainview grows his business. And as the title suggests, there is blood all along the way. It is not movie blood. Anderson is committed to letting us know just how human the process of finding and extracting oil was (and perhaps still is). These are men fighting with nature and nature isn’t often kind. But it does make Plainview rich. And in the process, he has a son, who is a key to much of the film, a symbol both of Plainview’s rarely expressed vulnerability and his absolute mercenary nature.

The second act starts with the appearance of Paul Sunday. (It is around this time that, as I recall it, Plainview is first given the sir name of “Daniel,” which struck me as odd, given that it is the actor’s name, as is Paul Sunday’s, played by Paul Dano. Perhaps this is a mystery of the film that will be unlocked by PTA sometime… or perhaps it is just coincidence.) Paul lives in a town he will not name and he tells Plainview & Co that there is oil in them thar’ hills. He gives the information to Plainview for a price.

Plainview arrives in the town in the guise of a bird hunter looking for some fresh air. One shot starts oil coming out of the ground and somewhere deep in my soul the theme from The Beverly Hillbillies started playing. It quickly stopped.

Plainview has found his ultimate mine… an entire area where oil seems to be just waiting to be pulled up and out. Again, I will refrain from details on how all that goes, but let’s just stipulate that Plainview becomes a dominating presence. His opposite number in this regard is Eli Sunday, who may or may not be the one who brought him there, but who is the spiritual leader of the community of poor farmers, who is learning the trade of reaching into the souls of others and taking whatever he wants, leaving them with a faith that would be destroyed if they could ever see him clearly.

Sunday battles Plainview for the soul of the community… or something like that. But Paul Dano, unfortunately, is simply not equipped to keep up with Day-Lewis. I’m not sure that there was a better choice out there. You needed a young Day-Lewis or Sean Penn or Leo DiCaprio to really pull it off. A guy like Ryan Gosling, who could kill in the character, is really too old. You can feel Anderson’s intent of this as a young, young man. He must not appear to be a match for Plainview, but a match he must be.

It is Anderson’s obsession with this competition in the story – and it is the central story here – that destroys the hopes we had for There Will Be Blood. It is no The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, though the similarities will generate many of the same reactions by many of the same people… and a similar troubled life at the box office. But Paul Thomas Anderson is extravagantly talented. A young filmmaker like Andrew Dominik can’t begin to infuse every frame with the clarity of vision that Anderson has. He does magic tricks above and beyond cinematography or a laconic pace. But he loses control of his story, so while every moment has its allure, the movie really stops working. It doesn’t find something else of importance to say about the great wildcatting characters of the movies this film will so often be compared to… it just becomes so myopic that the audience is trapped in the claustrophobia.

There is a brief steam of light in the proceedings when Kevin J O’Connor arrives and gives the very best performance in the film. His Henry arrives with news of Plainview’s family, long left behind. And like his son, Henry represents the idea that someone can offer Plainview something other than life as an island. Plainview needs Henry. And O’Connor’s rough, gentle, adult, generous performance is the only time in the film when I felt I was getting exactly what PTA was after from the start… when he truly controlled his film. Nobody really directs Daniel Day-Lewis. He is a brilliant force of nature. And the actor that Paul Dano could not be perhaps could not be any better cast… that kid may just not be out there. But it feels like O’Connor is just right, as the woefully underused Ciaran Hinds is (an underuse that keeps him from being the film's wonderful warm center).

By the time we get to the absolutely disastrous last major scene in the film, we can all imitate Day-Lewis’ Huston imitation. And sadly, the road having been lost and the story somewhat out in the wilderness - no longer leading into greatness, as the first act really felt like it was – but just trying to close off the open wound of Plainview’s life, we get a moment out of a Coen Bros period comedy. This scene may become the best remembered thing in There Will Be Blood – in a Scarface way, tonally – and that would be a shame. There is a lot of spectacular work here.

But this is the thing… it is the easy crutch to call this film uncommercial. It sure could have been a Best Picture nominee. It could have been the second true epic of Anderson’s brief career, Boogie Nights being the first, as a comprehensive journey through a period from a perspective familiar to very few people. He smashed that one out of the park. And its popularity is a testament to the fact that even something as uncommercial as a movie about a guy with a huge schlong and the platform to use it can find a good sized audience and an important place in film history.

There is a moment in There Will Be Blood where you can really feel the train going off the tracks. I won’t tell you what it is, because it is a key plot point. But the hard thing as a movie lover is that I completely understand why PTA made that choice. It really was the right choice for the characters. But it was a horrible mistake for the Movie, from which the story never recovers.

There is something brutal from my side of the screen when there is this much to respect and even love in a film… and to see it fail in the end absolutely. The score, by Jonny Greenwood, may well be the best of the year, so far matched only by the score for Lust, Caution for me. It is odd and brilliant and memorable like so much of the film. I look forward to seeing this movie again in a hurry. And it is possible that time will soften my view. But I don’t see turning the corner on the movie as a whole unless there is some powerful secret code that I just didn’t see. People will do Plainview imitations the way they do Tony Montana, never knowing they are imitating John Huston. They will repeat the details of a few scenes. And we will look at the images that Anderson and Elswit and Fisk created forever. They are indelible. But true greatness is lost for the lack of a third act that works.

-David Poland