An oilman's story well if slowly told

Rating: 8/10 (24 February 2008)

Director Paul Thomas Anderson, "inspired" by Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel "Oil" and the career of Californian wildcatter Ed Doheny, has combined with the fine British actor Daniel Day Lewis to produce a truly remarkable character, Daniel Plainview, oil wildcatter and horrible human being. While Sinclair, a lifelong socialist, attacked capitalism overtly, Anderson is more subtle; he concentrates on the effect that the unbridled lust for wealth has on one man.
We are told little about Daniel Plainview's background. He came to the West from Fond du Lac,Wisconsin (as did Doheny), probably off a small farm, spent some time working for the US Geological Survey, where he picked up some expertise in mineral location, and by the time the film opens (1898) he is mining for silver in New Mexico. Mining was and is a hard, dangerous business, and when one of his employees is killed in an accident Daniel takes custody of the man's infant son. Daniel strikes oil and by 1913 has several producing wells. His big break comes when Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), a farm boy from Southern California estranged from his dirt-poor evangelical family, tells him about oil seeping from the ground. Daniel swoops down on the family, buys their miserable property, starts drilling and hits a gusher. But this wealth is not without its costs.
Daniel, who admits to his erstwhile "brother" that he dislikes most people, is a driven man who will do anything including murder to achieve his goals, and he makes John D. Rockefeller Senior, the ruthless founder of Standard Oil, look like a gentleman. Starting out as a small time wildcatter he eventually aligns himself with the big boys, Union Oil of California, having been exquisitely rude to their opposition, Standard Oil. But wealth does not buy him happiness; by 1927 he has come to resemble Charles Foster Kane, alone in his huge mansion (in fact the one Doheny built for his son), alcoholic, rejecting his son, and in despair.
This saga is told in a leisurely fashion and some viewers will find the pace (stately) and length (2 hours 40 minutes) daunting. Daniel Day Lewis creates an enormously forceful character though we are left to work out for ourselves how he got that way. His Daniel is not religious though he pays lip service to the evangelicals along the way. His "spiritual" opponent, the Sunday's other son Eli (also played by Paul Dano), a Pentecostal preacher, turns out to be two-faced and the film ends in a final confrontation between the two.
I'm not sure who the villain is meant to be - atheists and believers can both be ruthless capitalists  it's up to the rest of us to make sure they do not get out of hand. Even so, the film is an impressive achievement from a director previously known for small, quirky movies like "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia". The cinematography is wonderful  you can also smell the oil - and the musical score atmospheric. Above all, the film captures the mood of the times. Now, of course we have to stop burning the stuff.