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January 23, 2008

There Will Be Blood

Blood bleeds. Where does it lead?

By Andrew

Since There Will Be Blood dropped in the cinematic American sea in late December, critics have been circling like sharks, analyzing every little bit they can get their critical chompers on. A lot has been said about the film already (see here,
here, here, here, here, here, or here). But aside from a handful of contrarians – who I like to think are sort of taking wild potshots down an empty hall not unlike a scene in the film’s final act – the consensus has been that whatever Blood is – beautiful but vacant? Smart but cynical? – it works.

I know it works, because I was one of the affected. I initially left the film speechless, not knowing what to think – only knowing that I was feeling something, an immense impression. Soon after, however, I was at my keyboard, working through my feelings with words – which is what I suspect all the critics are doing now in the ever increasing informal internet literature on the film. Consigned to their own expertise in film, most have been very busy listing the heady amount of stylistic film references throughout There Will Be Blood – mostly American 1970s films, such as Days of Heaven for its beautiful American vistas; McCabe & Mrs. Miller for its Western genre revisionism; or The Shining for its menacing atmosphere.

My own mind turned to the film’s themes and its politics. Oil, violence, greed, competition – in telling Plainview’s story, roughly adapted from Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson clearly has the headlines of our age in mind. Yet, inevitably, it’s a political film only indirectly, political by way of the emotions the film cultivates through its story, the telling of the life story of Daniel Plainview, an oil prospector at the turn of America’s 20th century. The film rarely leaves Plainview to sketch out the world he inhabits – and by extension, shed some light on our current day predicaments.

One might draw an analogy between the conflict of Daniel Plainview’s expansionist ambitions in the town of Little Boston, and the growing church of the young preacher Eli Sunday, who’s looking to expand on the same turf; and the Bush administration’s foreign affairs and Islamist religious resistance. But even then, such an analogy is crude – truly crude, for while the conflicts certainly share elements of power and greed at some impossibly universal level, oil seems to be the only material element they share in common. Like any number of Americans who blame the Bush administration alone for the ills of our world, the film remains too focused on the unscrupulous agenda of one individual to provide any insight into our world’s dilemmas.

While Plainview has power as an entrepreneurial oil baron, the greater share of that power only exists in his imagination. Every motif in the film refers only indirectly to the economic and political world we live in, but is indisputably tied to Plainview’s worldview. For instance, Anderson is so attentive to detail that he casts Plainview’s final scene in a bowling lane, a visual joke suggesting that when Plainview isn’t striking oil or people, he’s scoring strikes for sport. It’s an absolutely masterful touch, and yet it leaves wide open the question of Anderson’s intentions.

The total attention paid to one character, a single man, coupled with the immense strength of the main performance of Plainview by Daniel Day-Lewis, may turn the film into more of a character study, and not the broad allegorical fable Anderson had in mind. To be fair, interviews with both Paul Thomas Anderson and Day-Lewis have suggested they never intended the film as a political polemic; it was the telling of one man’s personal story all along.

So why did There Will Be Blood affect me so much? On paper, Blood’s a film I should have hated. Like Martin Scorsese’s recent The Departed, it is a film that presumes to critique a world of violence by illustrating its male emotional (and literal) casualties – an endlessly recycled trope of American film that has been played out at least since the days of film noir (if only because the earliest example of it I can think of is Nicholas Ray’s 1952 On Dangerous Ground), and which I suspect does more to upkeep troubled, violent masculinity than it does to subvert it (see my old review of Michael Mann’s Heat for a better idea of what I mean).

There Will Be Blood is ultimately effective – and affective – I believe, on the level of performance. Of all that has been written about Blood, not enough has looked at how Day-Lewis’s performance is the film’s moral backbone. There has been praise, plenty of it, but very little analysis. For one, Day-Lewis – and surely Anderson and his sound production team – routinely convey Plainview’s emotion with the sound of breathing. Whenever Plainview is upset, sad or frustrated at the world that dares frustrate his male self – and the male desire to control – so damn much, Day-Lewis subtly sighs, consistently conveying a shriveled human under Plainview’s tortured husk. Breathing is also the first sound we hear as Plainview is silver mining, and his difficulty breathing is the most striking thing after he befalls his first misfortune, a mining accident. This misfortune leaves Plainview with a leg injury, and Day-Lewis – true to his craft – carries himself through the rest of the film with a distinctive limping stride. You could say Anderson artfully hands the film to Day-Lewis, and off he walks with it.

Through a large subplot involving a visit from a man claiming to be Plainview’s brother, the film constructs a huge, off-screen void where Plainview’s past resides. We get hints of what Plainview’s own father was like; with this little information we are left wondering, “How did Plainview come to be the monster that he is?” That’s the real social question, perhaps put forth tepidly by Anderson’s script, but it’s a question put more forcefully by Day-Lewis’s performance. The extent that we ask this question is the extent to which There Will Be Blood succeeds as more than a singular probing look into one man’s hateful life. Due to the ruthlessness of the film I think that such success will inevitably vary from viewer to viewer, person to person – thematically, the film throws a wide net, which ultimately may be what the critical feeding frenzy is about. The themes are broad enough – and affecting enough – that everybody can take a bite. It's the specifics that prove harder to chew.

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