Grand Prix 2008

Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood":
No Gods, Just Monsters
By Norman Wilner

I really have just two words to say about Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood: "God" and "damn".

It's nearly three hours long, but it moves like a shot. It's a period piece that's utterly contemporary in its construction. It's a character study of a monster — two monsters, actually, locked in a perpetually hubristic battle with one another for the bragging rights to all creation.

Or at least that's where it ends up. At first, There Will Be Blood just looks like a father-son story, following an oilman named Daniel Plainview — played by Daniel Day Lewis as if he was the bastard son of John Huston in Chinatown and Mr. Burns from The Simpsons — who carts a young orphan boy from one small California town to the next, as he negotiates for the drilling rights that will make him very, very wealthy. (The boy makes a great prop; with a child at his side, Daniel looks like a family man, rather than a robber baron.)

But then we meet the other monster, a young preacher named Eli Sunday whom Daniel and his lad encounter in the tiny community of Little Boston. The achingly pious Eli — presuming himself to be a civic leader — demands an honorarium for his fundamentalist church and a say in Daniel's affairs. This, as they say, does not sit well, a rivalry that stretches out over decades, and which could easily be read as an unsettling allegory for America's perpetual conflict between commerce and faith.

Anderson established himself as a natural-born filmmaker with Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, but There Will Be Blood is an evolutionary step beyond his previous work. As good as the earlier films are — and they are very, very good — there's a sort of shine to them. Whether it's the fluidity of the Steadicam shots in Boogie Nights, or the glistening streetscapes of Magnolia's Los Angeles, or Punch-Drunk Love's bursts of impressionistic color, they're movies that were made to be noticed; Anderson can't help drawing our attention to his accomplishments. They're somehow ... boastful.

There Will Be Blood isn't like them; instead, it's a story of boastful characters, Anderson having shifted his show-offy tendencies onto the creatures within his frame. Daniel Plainview spends almost all of his time telling people of his accomplishments, and what miracles of comfort and prosperity are yet to come, even as he pretends to modesty. And as Eli becomes ever more committed to preaching his particular take on the gospel, his messianic fervor grows larger and larger until he appears to believe he is, himself, just a loaf and a fish away from being declared the risen Christ.

As their inevitable confrontation draws closer and closer, Anderson closes the ends of his movie around them like an arena: Options are reduced, and peripheral characters — even the boy Plainview once treated as his son — drop away, or are pushed. The look of film grows dark, returning to the primal muck in which we started. (The production feels grimy, primal, real, as though Anderson somehow dragged his cameras a hundred years into the past.)

A final sequence in Plainview's decaying mansion finds the reclusive oilman hunched over like an animal — a callback to the opening sequence which saw him drag his wounded body out from the hole in the earth that first tried to claim him. Or is it the acknowledgment that Plainview has never been anything more than a wounded, desperate animal, a suggestion that the well-spoken, genteel front he presented to his clients was just a handy mask?

No mask is necessary for Eli, though; he's always been as insane as he is arrogant, and makes no attempt to disguise either trait when he returns, empty and broken, to claim the debt he believes Plainview owes him. When the film ends, their business is settled beyond any question.

There Will Be Blood is one of the most striking and engrossing films of the decade. You goggle at its audacity, its majesty, its incredible ambition — and then, you goggle all over again at how artfully its director accomplishes every last challenge he sets for himself. This is a tremendous work of art, is what it is.

Norman Wilner
© FIPRESCI 2008

This is an expanded version of a review first published in the Toronto edition of Metro on January 4, 2008.

Norman Wilner is the senior film writer for NOW Magazine, and also writes on film and DVD for Sympatico/MSN. He maintains a personal blog at www.wilnervision.com

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