Greed Comes at the Price of One's Soul

Rating: 10/10 (18 July 2008)

Daniel Day-Lewis has always been fascinating to me. He's an extraordinary actor who I believe I saw for the first time when I saw Gangs of New York, in which he was one of the most lovable villains I'd seen up till that time. But with each role I've seen him play, he has an entirely different presence. For instance, he seems like a totally different person in every way when he's shaven as opposed to mustachioed. Despite Day-Lewis's intriguing stiffness and Minotaur-like density, he is capable of inordinate transformation to the point of complete contradiction. In There Will Be Blood, his physical inhabitance of Daniel Plainview, accompanied by a brilliantly realized sandpaper voice, is a lurching cartoon villain of opaqueness, impossible to probe. Day-Lewis's portrayal is so deeply subjective that the innate content of Plainview asserts itself thoroughly over form.
A rivalry is sparked between secularist rags-to-riches oil magnate Plainview and ambitious young priest Eli Sunday, played powerfully by Paul Dano, as Plainview, feeling secure in his dissociative feelings, sees himself reflected in Eli's anti-social greed. Plainview's son is the only person he trusts amidst all of his shrewd manipulations and pragmatism, but when his son goes deaf after an oil rig incident, they estrange and his trust becomes totally displaced and his soul is eclipsed, and the world dances around these inert, degenerate people until, well, they are "finished."
Paul Thomas Anderson, all of whose films so far have become favorites of mine, has succeeded in setting a new bar in cinema, having bewilderingly gotten away clean with an incredible amount of risks with this shifty, cynical, mystifying masterpiece. Like Day-Lewis playing Daniel Plainview, he has plunged into a solitary subjectivity that has removed him from the influences of mainstream convention. It's an unremitting film, relentless to be completely itself. One of the less subtle examples would be Jonny Greenwood's atonal and dissonant music score.
A key scene in this movie is the first sermon given by Eli Sunday. It is a perfectly directed and acted scene. Eli proceeds to make an extreme fool out of himself, with total confidence. What he says and does are all completely ridiculous, often contradicting himself or failing to make any sense, and no matter how far Dano goes, Anderson's tone remains undisturbedly cynical. Just as he did with the documentary interviews in Boogie Nights, we aren't put off by the self-indulgent idiocy of his characters; in fact we laugh a bit without losing touch with the film's current.
There Will Be Blood is the fascinating sort of film out of which you stumble, distraughtly rummaging for an adjective or neighborhood of feeling that are both vivid and explanatory enough to cover all corners of your experience and individually characteristic enough to identify your mind, which is routinely on a different wavelength that this movie. It's an indictment of the sociopathic institutions of industry and organized religion. It's a character study. It's a clash of egos. It's an impression of a time. It's a detailed account of a time.
This is a film movie buffs will analyze, debate, and rewatch endlessly. Now of course the snobs will retort with claims that each other does not understand the context and meaning and this and that, but the important thing to do with this film is wash away all that you hear from pretentious pseudointellectuals and let the film effect you on your own terms.
It can hardly be argued that there was most certainly kismet involved in the overlapping productions of There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men, two films released recently very close together, having been shot in the same West Texas locations and at times getting in each other's way.