Anderson's 'intimate epic' is a masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (5 March 2008)

"There will be Blood" confirms my long held belief that Paul Thomas Anderson is the finest director of his generation working anywhere today. His achievement is all the more remarkable from being so different from what he has done before. Well, maybe not that different; in adapting Upton Sinclair's novel "Oil" for the screen, Anderson has zoned in on the relationship between the central character, Daniel Plainview and his nemesis, the young preacher Eli Sunday, and on the inner turmoil that drives Plainview, in a way that recalls the fundamental relationships in his own movies, "Hard Eight", "Boogie Nights", "Magnolia" and "Punch Drunk Love". However, this is the first time he has gone to another source for his material and the end result is electrifying.
This is an epic full of expansive, large-scale spaces marking it out as a different kind of epic from "Magnolia" or "Boogie Nights" but it is an intimate epic often told in close-up and with dialogue divided between only a very few characters. (It's like "Giant" but pared down to its very basics). It may also remind you of Huston's "The Treasure of Sierra Madre", (men, who in a different set of circumstances might be deemed as 'good', driven to terrible acts through greed), and "Greed" itself, Von Stroheim's great silent 'epic' also comes to mind. The first fifteen minutes or so are wordless and it comes as something of a shock when we first hear Plainview speak. It sounds like a narration in which he is addressing us, the audience, before the camera reveals him addressing a room full of people whose land he needs so he can drill for oil.
The comparison, too, with "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" is driven home when we first hear him speak. Surely, this is the voice of Huston himself. I am not sure if the decision to play Plainview in the vocal style of Huston was the director's or the actor's choice but in doing so Daniel Day-Lewis creates a singularly memorable character whose vocal tics, nevertheless, don't distract from our appreciation of him. It is a performance that, once-and-for-all, establishes Day-Lewis as the premier actor of his generation. He isn't above playing to the gallery or reveling in the role to such an extent that his pleasure becomes somewhat contagious but like Brando and Olivier before him he can now afford to wink at and nudge his audience in the sure knowledge it's the character and not the actor who is hamming it up. Plainviw is one of the screen's great mad men and Day-Lewis imbues that madness with a Lear-like intensity.
So good is his performance there is a danger that Paul Dano, (the only other actor to really register), will be over-looked and this was certainly the case when the Oscar nominations were being dished out. Dano is superb as the sanctimonious 'false prophet' Eli Sunday and there are a few scenes when both actors are squaring up to each other that are master-classes in the art of acting. Dano disappears from the film about two-thirds of the way through only to return for a coda that brings the film to a memorable, if abrupt, close.
Like "Magnolia" and "Boogie Nights" this is a long film but it never seems so and I could have been doing with more of it. It is a beautiful film to look at, (Robert Elswit winning an Oscar for his cinematography), and Jonny Greenwood's ominous, symphonic score greatly adds to the drama. It has also been called a classic in the making but it is not self-consciously so. Rather it feels like a natural progression for its director, delving further into the psyches of his protagonists to discover what it is that drives them to do the things they do. Plainview may be a figure from an historical past but he could just as easily have been the father of Jason Robarts or Philip Baker Hall in "Magnolia" or the grandfather of Cruise in that same film or of Adam Sandler's quirky, volatile and maybe just slightly insane Barry Egan in "Punch Drunk Love".