#22 — There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
Paul Thomas Anderson insists that when he wrote the screenplay for There Will Be Blood, he had only one actor in mind for the lead role of Daniel Plainview. What’s more, if Anderson had been turned down by the thespian he sought, the screenplay would have gone into a drawer to languish unproduced. That seems like hyperbole, an romantic notion to put forth when things have already worked out. But watching Daniel Day Lewis’s performance in the film, I believe Anderson’s claim. Who else could have taken on the role with the same fervor, the same intense elan? The performance is a percolating stew of menace, focused intelligence, unexpected warmth, and warped integrity. It springs up with inventiveness. Day-Lewis delivers the sort of performance that Orson Welles or Marlon Brando snapped off when they were at their most free and fearless. It’s highly stylized, built from the outside in, marked by devilish line readings and measured-out physicality. The acting is far from invisible. In fact, it’s ever present, a parade of actorly choices, no less inspired just because they’re not transparent. You feel Day-Lewis working, striving, digging, bending his own identity to fit into the carved-out chasm of his character. It never feels like this is a person you can walk out your front door and bump into, even if the door jamb was a time machine that could spirit you back to the era in which the film takes place. In pushing the boundaries of the theatrical, Day-Lewis ironically creates a performance that feels remarkably authentic.

It’s not just the excellence of the work that makes Day-Lewis’s absence from the film inconceivable, it’s the way the performance is in perfect harmony with the outsized boldness of Anderson’s vision. Always a director of uncommon ambition, Anderson approaches There Will Be Blood as if making a movie for the ages, one that reverberates with accomplishment. Every scene is marked by purpose, all but buckling under from the layers of meaning stacked within it like dense cordwood. This is often a blueprint for a film smothered by its own ambition, but Anderson has an uncanny ability to make the tightly controlled seem organic and unpredictable. Anderson’s shadow across the film is as clear as if he routinely stepped right in front of the key light as he yelled “Action,” but, as with Day-Lewis, the heavy hand someone delivers a light touch.

Anderson began with Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, though perusing any cursory recap of that tome quickly confirms the suspicion that the adaptation is as loose as a spinning tire with the lug nuts removed. Anderson tells the tale of an fledgling oilman who journeys to California, intending to tap into oil rich land that a anxious stranger told him about. With his young adopted son in tow, presented as much as a business partner as he is a family member, this oilman, the previously named Daniel Plainview, presents himself to those he encounters as a benevolent business, prepared to seek his fortune in such a way that the entire surrounding area will prosper. He’s especially concerned with the property held by the Sunday family, which brings him into contact with the devout preacher Eli Sunday, played with methodical care by Paul Dano.

This is the foundation of Anderson’s inspired examination of the two colliding and corrupting forces that have shaped the American experience: capitalism and religion. The ongoing suspicion and animosity that Plainview and Sunday feels towards one another expands like a infected boil as each man prospers on his chosen path, and Anderson uses their feverish feud to demonstrate the ways in which great power instills its own sort of crippling insecurity, especially when one dominant influence is forced to stand in the reflected light of the other. There Will Be Blood is a grand essay on the progression of a nation as it crossed into the century it would dominate. Anderson is never didactic about it, though. He doesn’t editorialize, bringing his arguments and observations to the screen strictly through gripping drama. The underlying ideas enhance the work, never overwhelm it.

Throughout, Anderson wield his camera masterfully, often exhibiting a staggering command of the mechanics of filmmaking. There are multiple set pieces that can be extracted and held up as examples of sterling craft, led by the extended, nearly worldless sequence at the beginning of the film, tracking Plainview’s evolution from solo miner to upstart oilman with a small scattering of employees. There’s also a fiery accident at an oil well, a coerced confession on bended knee in a bright wooden church, and, of course, the film’s lengthy final scene which taught everyone how to incorporate milkshake metaphors into boasts of one-upmanship. There’s so much packed into the finished product, and yet Paul Thomas Anderson never wavers. He builds a film that is enraptured with the power of movies themselves, struck with the belief that greatness is achievable, is arguably the defining goal for a director. In the process, he virtually redefines what bravura filmmaking looks like.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)