Shakespearean

Rating: 10/10 (29 January 2008)

An uncompromising, Shakespearean drama of titanic passions and their consequences, There Will Be Blood is anchored by Daniel Day-Lewis's volcanic performance as an obsessive, ruthless, satanic oilman. Also highly notably are the cinematography and the often ultra-dissonant score (composed by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood), both of which help carry a riveting, nearly wordless opening sequence that announces this will be anything but a conventional film experience. (The use of the buoyant finale from Brahms's Violin Concerto at two points as a supplement to Greenwood's searing string writing, which shows he knows his Ligeti and Xenakis, is deliciously incongruous.)
The film doesn't strive to explain much, which is one of its great strengths; it presents and leaves it to viewers to find connections between events and later actions on the part of characters. A more conventional film would underline motivations more clearly through dialogue. That makes certain scenes--such as when H.W. sets his father's sleeping quarters ablaze or when Daniel threatens to slit the throat of an oil executive--seem strange and incongruous. But never implausible. A second viewing (which I highly recommend) really clarifies the structure and the subtle handling of motivation and psychology.
I am haunted by the intensity of Lewis's performance, particularly the firelit scene in which he announces his misanthropic character (again, Shakespearean: think of the opening of Richard III, etc.). The way his face splits into a malicious grin as he contemptuously utters "these...people", followed by incongruous laughter, gives me chills (a scene unsurprisingly highlighted in the film's trailer). We all, no doubt, have a certain measure of Plainview in us--avarice, misanthropy, corruptibility, a potential for explosive violence; things most of us strive to overcome. But Plainview never becomes "civilized", not even after acquiring great wealth. He sleeps on the floor of his bowling alley, as if he were still out prospecting in the wild and forced to rest on the hard earth. Seeing him let all his untamed, misanthropic rage boil over in the conclusion is exhilarating and horrifying--but, in light of what has gone before, a seemingly inevitable denouement. Like Macbeth, Plainview is a man who had talent and potential but was corrupted by his passions. A flashback shot, just after the decisive rejection of H.W., says it all: We see Daniel walk away from the boy who has become his son, toward the derrick: That's the choice that has shaped who he has become.
Coming as it does toward the end of the Bush era, the picture could certainly be seen as an allegory of destructive forces that have shaped much American history and currently form integral parts of the Republican party: evangelical chicanery and unbridled corporate greed. The Nietzschean will to power behind both leads to an uneasy alliance--to say the least. This is by far Paul Thomas Anderson's best and most penetrating film to date, and you'd have to go back to something like Raging Bull to find such a tour-de-force collaboration between a filmmaker and an actor of genius.