After a five year
sabbatical, Paul Thomas Anderson returns minus any of his usual ensemble, his
rapid editing, the Mamet-like dialogue and relocates to an epic birth of a
nation story, intensely focused on a study of an oil prospector, played by
Daniel Day Lewis.
In ever so loosely adapting Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! he has remained in
California but not so you’d notice. To capture the turn of the century
landscape of oil prospecting he went close to Marfa, south-west Texas, where at
the very same time his main rivals at the Oscars, the Coens were shooting No
Country For Old Men. At times it feels like it could be adapted from the
biblically hewn style of Cormac McCarthy. But this is absolutely a different
beast from the Coen’s chase story from hell, and delves deep into a fallen soul
and his relationship with his adoptive son.
There’s no edge of the seat tension here, more a stately, reflective visual
sense and of course, bestriding it all a performance of such sheer elemental conviction
by Daniel Day Lewis you could be almost forgiven for overlooking the complexity
of the film overall.
Just as Punch-Drunk Love had a low-key virtuosity, after the full-on excess of
Boogie Nights and Magnolia, There Will Be Blood formally at least,
reprises its chamber intensity.
Its score by Radiohead guitarist, Johnny Greenwood, and the
cinematography by Robert Elswitt (who took an Oscar for his efforts) cry
out anything but small-scale but the film does its drilling most tellingly as a
redefinition of story-telling through the close-up, and dissolves so slow they
inhabit another time. Anderson eschews any of the wider socialist critique of
Upton Sinclair for an allegorical portrayal where the issue, as in Scorcese’s
Color of Money, becomes other than its obvious subject. Only Richard Kelly, and
Todd Haynes in American cinema today display close to this ability for skilled
dissimulation. It can feel like Adorno said: every time I go to the movies I
feel a little bit less intelligent. Thankfully, there are correctives, even
though they are sometimes wrongfully received – like Kelly’s Southland Tales.
In the case of There Will Be Blood it’s slow, harsh beauty have so much obvious
brilliance it seems for many , oddly I think, to have eclipsed his previous
work.
There is restraint but ultimately Anderson is too playful a director to resist
a joker card. It isn’t so wild as the raining frogs of Magnolia but it’s a
curve ball which can’t help but unsettle the viewer – the use of Brahms’ Violin
Concerto as the credits roll underlines this strangeness, to an extent folding
the drama into itself. You don’t have to worry about a tricksy self-referential
Charlie Kaufman-like gambit but it’s sure to stay with you as you leave the
film, nagging away.
The grand theatricality of the finish if you look too literally, will leave
you underwhelmed; why such a dramatic change of tone, bordering on
the absurd? The long final scene in the mansion of Daniel
Planview takes place a good number of years after the story began with him
prospecting for silver but finding oil instead and emerging, crawling
with a broken leg as though a man come back from hell. It sets up a
menace which the ending refuses to honour, indeed questions its
reality. Don't expect laughs but there is a comedy in the rivalry
between Plainview and the preacher, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). The
theological seriousness of Cormac McCarthy (yet to be seen on film) falls under
an irreverent gaze. Part horror villiany, part literary
adaptation, part Kubrick homage, part homage to John Huston, this truly
maverick creation is more than anything a kind of south of eden
story which aims to go past its literary inspiration to a highly
nuanced cinema of tainted reflection.
If this sounds like a disregard for story then I'd refer you
back to everything else he's done. This shouldn't come as any great
surprise. There Will Be Blood is an enigmatic
experience - I read that many feel the need to see it again - it
pays its debts to 70s film-making but it seeks to hone their
influence into a quite original statement. The realism is
overshadowed by an absurd sense of literate horror, an odd blend but
mostly compelling. I found nothing in it like the pay-off of Samuel
L. Jackson in Anderson's debut Hard 8, saying, "I know about Atlantic
City", or in Boogie Nights, "I like sunsets too, but...sunrises are
better" or Magnolia's "And the book says that we may be through with
the past but the past ain't through with us." Still, it's one of the
outstanding films of the last ten years.
Charles Maclean
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