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"There Will Be Blood,"
directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Paramount, 2007, 158 minutes.
Blood for Oil by Jo Ann Skousen
With its misleading portent of terrifying violence, "There Will Be Blood" is a terrible title for what is in fact a terrific film — and one I almost passed up as a result. After enduring the bloody bashings and slashings of "Gone Baby Gone," "The Departed," "Eastern Promises," and the melodious but malicious "Sweeney Todd" in recent months, I simply didn't have the stomach for a movie whose title seemed to promise buckets of blood amid wanton, ruthless violence.
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Jo Ann Skousen is entertainment editor of Liberty. She lives in New York.
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Yet how could I call myself entertainment editor of this magazine if I was too squeamish to view a film nominated by both the Academy and the Golden Globes for Best Picture and Best Actor of the Year? So I finally bought my ticket and entered the theater, prepared to cover my eyes for most of the three-hour bloodbath.
To my surprise, the film is hardly bloody at all. There is heart-pounding tension, enhanced by the remarkable musical score of Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead). There are some eye-squinching accidents associated with mining and drilling, and some nasty fights. But the moments of impact take place just offscreen, Hitchcock style, blunting the visual image but not the emotional punch. The title, I learned, is mostly metaphorical, not literal.
Based on Upton Sinclair's novel "Oil!", this movie is an epic tale chronicling the early years of oil development in the Southwest. In a gutsy move, director P.T. Anderson ("Boogie Nights," "Magnolia," "Punch-Drunk Love") films the first 20 minutes completely without dialogue as prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) struggles by the sweat of his brow to wrest silver and then oil from the ground. This wordless exposition might have failed with a lesser actor, but Day-Lewis pulls it off magnificently, portraying the indefatigable will and physical determination of the protagonist.
The film is a subtle, if unwilling, paean to capitalism. When his silver mine plays out and oil suddenly oozes up, Plainview adapts, designing oil derricks and drilling devices to bring oil to the surface. He travels from area to area, leasing land from homesteaders and pumping the oil out from under their feet. He is straightforward in admitting that he will make more money than the landowners will, but that's because he has the knowledge and the skill to remove the raw material and send it to a refinery where it can be transformed into a usable product. Without him (or someone like him), the oil would remain underground and worthless.
But the homesteaders, too, will profit, not only from the royalties Plainview will pay for leasing their arid, infertile land but also from the infrastructure his company will create. In a profound speech (apparently improvised by Day-Lewis), Plainview explains that his company will build schools, irrigation, and roads. Their land will at last produce grain. In short, the capitalist-developer will earn the most, but his employees will earn a good wage and the landowners' standards of living will rise. Everyone wins.
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To my surprise, the film is hardly bloody at all. The title, I learned, is mostly metaphorical, not literal.
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In direct conflict with the oil man is Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a self-appointed preacher whose family's mineral rights Plainview has leased. As in the biblical story of the twins Jacob and Esau, Eli is contrasted with his twin brother Paul, who has sold out the family's rights for a "mess of pottage." Eli wants Plainview to contribute money to his church and, more importantly, to be an example of piety to the community. When the town's first well is about to come in and Plainview invites the community to celebrate the first gusher, Sunday insists on being allowed to bless the well first, ostensibly to ask for God's protection but actually to reinforce the town's dependence on him, not Plainview.
The "blood" in the film's title symbolically emphasizes the conflict between Plainview's blood of the earth — oil — and Sunday's "blood of the Lamb." While Plainview drills the earth for oil, Eli "drills" his parishioners to cast out devils, with histrionic sermons that are downright scary. Early in the film, a father dabs oil from a new gusher onto his baby son's forehead in a gesture of baptism, foreshadowing the conflict between two transforming powers — money and faith. This conflict continues throughout the film, particularly when Plainview's son suffers an injury that Sunday's brand of faith is unable to heal.
But Plainview is no saint. In fact, director Anderson claims his character is modeled on Count Dracula (another reference to blood). Although Plainview can demonstrate acute tenderness toward his son and his workers, he can just as quickly turn violent. In a critical scene in front of a burning oil rig he appears to have descended into Dante's Inferno, a psychological condition from which he never escapes. The final two words of the film reinforce this religious allegory.
Blood also enters the story metaphorically through the introduction of an adopted son and a half-brother. Emotionally powerful issues emerge: Is blood thicker than water? Do blood relations matter? Is one's character determined by one's blood?
And then, just when we begin to accept that the title is simply an abstract metaphor, it suddenly becomes a literal promise.
There will be blood. Oh yes. After all, there will be blood. ?
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