two men - at cross purposes

There Will Be Blood – Paul Thomas Anderson

Two attitudes to winning: the first relishes excellence, pride, victory; the second delights in an opponent’s defeat and relishes dominance and supremacy. Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) wants to defeat others because he can’t bear someone else to win. Plainview enters the film as a man with no history to throw light on his dislike bordering on hatred of other people. Director Anderson therefore limits at the outset the moral and emotional range of his movie. There are no women, no relationships save the will to supremacy – over nature and one’s fellow man. While this simplifies our emotional response to his central character, we can only relate to him as a misanthropic sociopath who will destroy anyone who gets in his way and perhaps carries within him the seeds of his own destruction. There Will Be Blood is not an easy film to read but everything about it suggests that Anderson wants us to be as interested in what Daniel Plainview might represent as what he is. For what he is, as written, is monstrous but one-dimensional.

The first 20 minutes, with no dialogue and a unique, innovative and highly atmospheric atonal soundtrack (Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood) as Daniel hacks at unforgiving rock to produce silver ore evokes Kubrick’s Dawn of Man opening to 2001 A Space Odyssey. The wordless, elemental relationship of Plainview to the unyielding earth, armed only with the most basic of tools, vividly recalls Kubrick’s apes responding to the same necessity. The sheer inner power and indomitability of this most singular man is superbly conveyed here by Day-Lewis, certainly the best physical actor of his generation.

Breaking his leg courtesy of dynamite and solitary working, Plainview drags himself and some silver to safety. Profit from the silver finances a switch to drilling for oil, the substance that would dominate our modern world but which at the beginning of the 20th century had established only a few of its thousands of eventual uses. When a wellhead accident kills one of his men Daniel adopts the man’s son, thereafter known as ‘HW’. He uses HW to sustain the fiction of being a family man which aids his ruthless negotiations with farmers for buying their land. Voraciously acquiring new drilling sites Daniel is visited by Paul Sunday (Paul Dano). In return for $1,000, Sunday tells Daniel he will find oil on his family farm in California.

Going to the Sunday farm Daniel meets Paul’s twin Eli, (confusingly also played by Paul Dano) a charismatic lay preacher – and the central dramatic conflict of the film begins. Physically outmatched, Eli uses all the weapons of religion to try to prevail – guilt, sin, damnation, and a wheedling “God loves you” that drips of manipulative hypocrisy. Daniel ruthlessly buys up everything, including the Sunday farm Eli’s father sells cheaply. God and Mammon perhaps but what we see is simply two men locked in a naked battle of wills for dominance of the other which transcends spiritual or material profit. Like a bullfight – one must triumph, the other must die; Eli using subterfuge to overcome Daniel’s physical supremacy thus incurring his wrath even more. Daniel gains the ascendancy and eventually humiliates Eli when the young preacher demands money promised him for a new church.

Daniel begins to build a business empire founded on oil. When he is approached by the monopolistic Standard Oil Co of California (SOCAL) (eventually to be broken up in an anti-trust action in 1911) to buy up all his fields he takes furious offence at remarks made by the SOCAL negotiator. But Daniel understands the second fundamental constraint in the Oil Industry – having found it, you must move it. SOCAL use rail but Daniel decides to build a pipeline from his fields to the coast. Mr Bandy, a member of Eli’s Church owns a key piece of land in the pipeline’s path and demands as a condition of sale that Daniel be baptised “in the blood”. Daniel can’t refuse as Bandy holds a secret over his head. In an extraordinary scene we see Eli returning with interest, the humiliation Daniel had earlier meted out to him. He makes Daniel scream out his sins and beg God’s forgiveness. But there is nothing of God here: Eli relishes his power of vengeance on Daniel and just uses the religious context to exercise it. And no heart can ever have been more blackly rejecting God and Jesus than Daniel’s as his confessions are drawn like rotting teeth from his mouth.

In a wellhead explosion HW is rendered deaf. As he and Daniel are struggling to come to terms with his affliction, Daniel’s half-brother Henry appears carrying a letter from Daniel’s sister. Originally suspicious of Henry, Daniel uses him increasingly in the business. HW becomes jealous, sets fire to their cabin and is eventually sent away to a school for the deaf. But all is not what it seems and Daniel eventually reverts to his paranoid isolation.

In the final phase of the film around the great crash of 1929, now immensely wealthy, Daniel’s misanthropic urge to self-destruction shows him totally isolated even from HW. The scene is set for a final confrontation between Eli, now an oleaginous radio evangelist and the drunk, paranoid but still dangerous Daniel.

TWBB is stylishly and broodingly shot, and Greenwood’s highly inventive percussive score adds to a sense of constant menace. Languid editing and cinematography set a powerfully elegiac tone and account for the 158 minute running time. There is much in TWBB to admire. Day-Lewis is brilliant. And yet, he presents a paradox – his legendary preparation and obsessive commitment to a role has become so much part of our perception of him that he has made us constantly aware of his brilliance. It is as if he has double-bluffed us: we are so impressed by his performance he is unwittingly constantly reminding us that it is a performance. Though a very different actor, Day-Lewis shares the Jack Nicholson problem – their screen presence now overwhelms every character and therefore every film they are in. Only the strength of Paul Dano’s performance saves the film because they are really the only characters that register at all.

Day-Lewis will almost certainly get the acting Oscar but for me Playview is largely a reprise of Bill Cutting (Scorcese’s Gangs of New York). Both are brilliant but knowing performances. And we can’t help knowing he knows. In contrast say Tommy Lee Jones in The Valley of Elah literally disappears into the character of Hank and denying himself all the signals of his normally powerful screen presence – makes his performance for me much more satisfying, certainly more nuanced. Also Anderson undermines the elegiac tone and carefully accumulated characterisation of the first two hours of his film with a denouement that strays into gothic melodrama. He allows both actors, especially Day-Lewis to sabotage the credibility of their characters with OTT performances which though powerful, simply change the whole pace and tone of the film. Final sound and fury – signifying if not nothing, then a great deal less than the film appears to have been reaching for throughout.

The problem with this last scene is underpinned by an imbalance between the film’s narrative and its structure. Unwisely Anderson signals 4 dates to us coinciding with periods of the action: 1898, 1907, 1911 and 1927. These are relevant dates but as used invite us to see the film as segmented. And when the cut from segment 3 to 4 is bewilderingly fast, with us still unclear about issues suddenly left behind, this draws us out of our total absorption in the story thus far. Add to this that Anderson loses control of the acting in the last segment and the effect is almost to topple the whole balance of the film.

Taken together, the overweight acting at the end and the underlying weakness of structure, finally rob the film of the very resonances one feels were emerging from the painstaking narrative build-up. All the power drains away from the competing hypocrisies of two implacably egocentric men each relying on a different form of power – physical and spiritual – locked, to the death, in a battle of wills. For me Anderson throws away all of the very good things he has done earlier in the film by allowing his characters finally to be revealed as shallow and easily dismissible. Yet neither has seemed remotely superficial throughout the movie (though with a couple of ambiguous moments with Eli’s young sister and a brief scene in a brothel, Anderson comes perilously close to inviting a trite psychoanalytic reductionism). This pretty much destroys any hope of metaphorical resonance we might have hoped for. But then perhaps we should be grateful that TWBB at least reaches for something deeper, even if its execution finally perhaps falls short of its conception.

Filed under: 3 star, Drama, General, Hollywood, Paul T Anderson, Philosophical