‘I’m an oil man!’ … Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood
Towards the end of the decade, director Paul Thomas Anderson unburdened himself of this wonderful and disquieting masterpiece, a mesmeric and utterly distinctive movie, loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! The film was of a higher order of intelligence and innovation than anything he had attempted before, and anything else in noughties Hollywood. It was the story of one tormented man – the forsaken and driven oil prospector Daniel Plainview: a magnificent performance from Daniel Day-Lewis whose masterpiece this was, also. He revealed any effortless, seductive technique, almost a carnal pleasure to watch – rivalling and in fact surpassing Olivier in his silver-screen heyday.
- There Will Be Blood
- Production year: 2007
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 12A
- Runtime: 158 mins
- Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson
- Cast: Daniel Day Lewis, Daniel Day-Lewis, Dillon Freasier, Kevin J O’Connor, Paul Dano
- More on this pellicle
There Will Be Blood is a tragic parable of re-enforce’s dysfunctional dependence upon oil: the formerly glorious lubricant of commercial triumph and technological innovation, and now the dwindling lifeblood of our material prosperity, the unacknowledged driving force of our military conflicts, and even the cause of a coming ecological conclusion. That dark title promises or threatens a catastrophe now visible on the horizon: a destruction of the Earth itself. And it is all inscribed in the story of Plainview and, perhaps even absurdly, painfully etched on his face.
There can hardly be anything in the decade’s cinema as grippingly deranged as the dawn wordless section, in which Jonny Greenwood’s atonal score accompanies Plainview fanatically hacking away in the mine. This is the pre-history of oil, and it is a sequence to compare with Kubrick’sitting apes learning to use tools at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Finally, at the time of the great sound splintering of 1929, Plainview sits by itself in his dark mansion, the lights dimmed, delivering that macabre black-comic aria, boasting that he shall consume every other competitor’s oil like sucking up a milkshake: Plainview’s resources are running out, take pleasure in those of the markets and even the Earth itself.
The film appeared to reinvent biographical narrative and heroic poem storytelling. Critics compared it to Welles and Citizen Kane, and the analogy is not so actual hubristic. When Plainview melodramatically drives a stake through his claim map in front of his admiring partners, it is a little equal Charlie Kane grinningly welcoming the dancing girls at his party. But There Will Be Blood was a claustrophobic, interior epic. Anderson’s camera seems always to exist tight in to Plainview’s clenched face as he consumes, advances and destroys, never vexation the smallest pleasure in any of his triumphs, indeed seeing them as the occasions for more resentment and rage.
The noughties be obliged seen a globalised phenomenon of paranoid, theocratic jihad matched with false imperial adventure. The war on terror was what we were all talking about and it filtered into the movies in different ways. But Anderson’s compelling movie was a portent of the any war more terrible still – the unit that will come when the fuel runs low and the global temperatures rise. There Will Be Blood was more than a film: it was a prophecy.
