Turn of the Century

Rating: 10/10 (22 January 2008)

"Turn-of-the-century" is not a phrase you hear any more; that's because, 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, people were still using it to refer to the period of the late 1800s and early 1900s, a quaint period where things like long-distance radio, women competing in the Olympics and the internal combustion engine (the main component of new novelties like the automobile and the airplane) were just dipping a toe in the ocean of their impact on human society.
But now in 2008, nobody's using that phrase anymore  because of course, the century has turned once again, and the bemused wisdom of hindsight that "turn-of-the-century" once implied has become uncomfortable  because we are now in a future we are too busy and stressed out to appreciate or absorb. What new inventions, just being introduced, might radically change our lives and world in the years to come? Please  we're still trying to deal with 5 minutes ago.
There Will Be Blood is set in this period of yestercentury, opening in 1898. The film tracks for almost the next 30 years, a visionary oilman who lives the before, during and after of the tipping point when petroleum took over coal's mantle as the primary source of energy the world depended upon. This is a bracing film, buoyed by a mad, intense star performance by the great Irish actor Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, the oilman.
There Will Be Blood experiments with picture and sound in exhilarating ways. The first 16 minutes of the film contain not one word of dialogue, a rare way to start an American movie. The compositions and edits don't telegraph what we're supposed to be absorbing  the details exist quietly, in the larger mis-en-scene, and the pictures magnetize our concentration. Here's a film that asks us to pursue it, rather than vice-versa. For a film that largely takes place in 1911, it feels very much like film-making more sophisticated than what we are used to in 2008. Lighting is frequently dark. Characters sit at opposite ends of the frame, with vast, empty (yet pungent) expanses between them in the center of the shot. The art direction, costumes and cinematography capture the grime and quiet we are used to seeing in photos of the period, so effectively it's spooky.
The narrative pounds forward. Plainview experiments with early drilling techniques and uses trial, error and his own unstoppable gumption to get petroleum out from below the ground and into the hands of the big refining companies, racing against seemingly only himself in the insistence upon increasing the profit margin. A pivotal moment comes when Plainview is propositioned by a strange boy, Paul Sunday, who sells out the simple California family he abandoned for only $500. Sick over the freight costs he must pay the railways to ship his oil to the California refineries, Plainview heads west to exploit those whom the young Sunday has promised do not know. A musical score such as we've never heard before in the movies, written by a composer who has never before scored a fiction feature (Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood), keeps us on edge  fast-moving dissonant trills punctuated by foreboding, low-lying percussion.
Unexpectedly, while expenses go down (the rural Californians of the fictional Little Boston ignorantly sell their land to Plainview on the cheap) the overhead only increases. Plainview has no family, but by his side is a 10-year-old boy he tells everyone (including the boy) is his son  but more importantly, his "business partner". (The boy, whom he calls H.W., actually belonged to a fellow miner who died in a tragic accident in one of Plainview's earlier mining experiments, whose wife had died in childbirth, and Plainview grabbed the opportunity to effectively impersonate the child's father.) H.W. becomes a victim in another mining accident, suffering a major handicap  and Plainview loses his "business partner". (The boy's sweet, serious face was a major bonus in sucking signatures out of goat farmers and their wives.) Paul Sunday's younger brother Eli surfaces  and is the first individual that can rival Plainview in his drive and fever to conquer his fellow man (although Eli's vehicle of choice is radical evangelism, not capitalism)  and Plainview must invest in destroying him. The bloodthirsty immortality mounts  and the pendulum inevitability swings back, as impersonation (in a different form) and humiliation come home to roost.
What's happening to our world? There Will Be Blood is one the year's most brilliant films; it is completely about right now, and the teeming world on the brink of technological changes that will change our lives as we hurl forward into the future. Will we learn compassion and grace, check our growing greed and egos against a moral compass? There Will Be Blood has the audacity to flat out state that we won't. It's chilling  and claustrophobic. It invokes a fight-or-flight instinct  but the end of the film, where we are confined with our hero in a small room that mirrors the small dark mine in which we started this journey 29 years and 155 minutes earlier, we realize that there's no where to run to in this society  and that we will need nothing less than a superwoman to save us. Now.