There Will Be Blood

I might well have seen this movie long before now had there been anyone to alert me to the fact that reading Oil!, the Upton Sinclair novel upon which it is based, beyond the first couple of chapters would be a pointless exercise with respect to informing a viewing of the film. The novel is the story of how a young man of privilege, the son of an oil man, learns to reconcile the worldview he learned from his father with the much larger worldview of which the first is but a part. There Will Be Blood is the story of the oil man - and the greed and ambition that drive him, animate him, and ultimately destroy him.

Both novel and film and are sweeping epics, with the film spanning nearly thirty years and the novel roughly half that length of time; and both turn on the discovery of oil in a remote area of California in the early twentieth century; but beyond those aspects, they exist as entirely disparate works. Director and screenwriter Paul Thomas Anderson seems to have adapted Sinclair’s novel solely for the purpose of giving Daniel Day-Lewis a stage on which to perform and from which to deliver what is, without question, a remarkable performance.

He will win a well-deserved Best Actor Oscar, though there is little real competition in the field. Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd), George Clooney (Michael Clayton), and Tommy Lee Jones (In The Valley Of Elah) are basically filler material. Depp will win an Oscar one day, though it will likely be for the first Pirates Of The Caribbean movie and not whatever he’s actually nominated for (the same way Julia Roberts won for Pretty Woman but didn’t get her statuette until she did a Soderbergh picture); Clooney’s work has risen to the point that he is likely to get a nomination for any picture in which he plays a character other than Danny Ocean; and Jones is actually nominated here for his supporting role in No Country For Old Men, but there would have been no point in nominating him in that category because his co-star, Javier Bardem, is a lock for that award. If, for reasons passing understanding, the Academy votes for anyone other than Day-Lewis, then Viggo Mortensen will win for both Eastern Promises and A History Of Violence. But that won’t happen.

The Day-Lewis character, Daniel Plainview, is a silver prospector turned oil man, which is shown in the opening scene - and which is almost a throwaway scene, except that it establishes Plainview’s ambition and greed. He falls into his prospecting hole and breaks his leg - but pockets the silver he managed to extract before hauling himself out of the hole and back to the world.

Four years later, he is a traveling salesman, giving his wholesome family man pitch to townsfolk under whose homes he is sure oil is lying there waiting. When they refuse to take the offer exactly the way he wants them to take it, he moves on - he wants the oil and the money it will bring, but he wants the power and control, as well. His speech is well-rehearsed, his tone and mannerisms at once comforting and cajoling. He will build up your little community with roads and schools and churches and jobs, if only you will let him drill there; but it is not those ancillary things he cares about - they are but the cost of doing business.

He gets a tip about a place called Little Boston, underneath which is, he is told, an ocean of oil. What is it worth to Plainview to know where this place is? The deal is struck, and Paul Sunday, the tipster, directs Plainview to the Sunday family ranch, where nothing grows and they raise goats. They also praise Jesus a lot, and Paul’s brother Eli (both played by Paul Dano, though they are never on screen together - and if you think that seems goofy, you’re right - it’s one of the many liberties Anderson takes with the source material to shape and condense the story in his own way) asks Plainview to allow him to bless the first well that will be raised. Plainview agrees - he will say and do anything to get what he wants - and then reneges at the last minute. This is the first in a series of confrontations between the preacher and the oil man - a series that gets progressively more heated and violent as Plainview’s wealth and Eli’s congreation grow.

Javier Bardem (No Country For Old Men) is as much a lock for the Supporting Actor Oscar as Day-Lewis is for the Actor Oscar - but a nomination for Paul Dano in the Supporting category would have been in order. His preacher, Eli Sunday, is every bit as intense and driven as Daniel Plainview - when Eli lays hands on an old woman in his congregation and casts the devil (read, arthritis) out of her, pretending to remove the demon spirit physically from the woman and hurl it out the front door of the church, you can almost see him foaming at the mouth as he whips those rural folk into a frenzy of faith. He’s just as much of a shyster as Plainview - but instead of building a town so he can steal oil, Eli builds a congregation so he can steal a feeling of self-worth (though the source of his need for that feeling of self-worth, his overbearing father, is muted in the film - an instance where Anderson’s screenwriting sleight of hand does something of a disservice to the source material).

There are scenes with Plainview’s son and his half-brother Henry that I will leave here untreated - they contain plot points that will be more satisfying if you come to them unawares - but which enrich the character of Plainview, when he confesses that he wants no one to succeed but himself, and that he pretty much hates everyone else. Even among family, the men who work for him, and the townsfolk he almost embraces as surrogate neighbors - he is isolated, and this isolation fosters an insidious madness that drives the picture from humble beginnings to an ending that is at once horrifying and oddly comical. Indeed, there will be blood.

And that’s where we’ll leave that. The final scene, though not the picture’s climax, is the payoff. It’s difficult to watch, because it is as pathetic as it is compelling, but if you can reconcile it to all that has come before, you’re probably going to walk away having quite enjoyed this picture. And that is as it should be - it is a very fine film that does what the very best movies should do. It is character-driven, full of crisp, robust dialogue, and it challenges the viewer to see greatness in the otherwise grotesque and perverse.

Having said all of that, however, I must conclude with the opinion that the film is, in a way, fatally flawed; and that is because it feels as though every other element of the film serves to feed the character of Daniel Plainview, as portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis. I read an article about the Jamestown settlement in National Geographic last year and there was a quote in the article about how the tobacco plant has “an almost unique ability to suck the life out of the soil...it can ruin the land in a couple of years.” That’s not quite what you have going on in this movie, but it’s a little too close for comfort. The very greatness of Day-Lewis’ performance almost begins to marginalize everything else that is very, very good about this picture. I don’t know if I would have had that same opinion if I had not read almost all of the novel before I saw the movie - because so much of the source material is marginalized, as well. Anderson took but a kernel of the novel and parlayed it into a spectacular set-piece for Daniel Day-Lewis. I don’t feel cheated because so much of the novel was not translated into film - but I do think that I would like to have seen a bit more of what I read.

I won’t be disappointed if this wins Best Picture - it would be a very brave thing for the Academy to bestow its highest honor on something as unconventional as this, and might in some way make up for the way the Academy cheated Brokeback Mountain out of the Best Picture award it should have won - but when the last award is about to be announced later today, I’ll be hoping to hear that the Oscar goes to No Country For Old Men.