Seduced by Blood and Oil

Rating: 10/10 (19 January 2008)

I've watched four versions of Macbeth recently and the witches, among many things in the play, are fascinating for the spell they so easily cast on Macbeth. And so it was, after seeing There Will Be Blood I felt under a spell and seduced by director Paul Thomas Anderson's new film. I've seen it again since and feel more drawn on and into this poetic, and ambiguous work. I am amazed by the power the film has been able to exert on me. I'm amazed in the same sense The Shining drew me into the mystery of the characters and settings of that film. Instead of being led through the halls of a haunted hotel or the literal hedge maze, in There Will Be Blood I'm led down into the Earth where silver, gold, oil, and Hell exist and I am a-mazed. There are many images in There Will Be Blood of fire and damnation and of the Devil himself in the characters of Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday. Both know the Devil well. All of the acting is top-notch but Daniel Day-Lewis creates not so much a man as he does an elemental force of nature, a force that can and will destroy even those he deeply cares about, his own family
I see a great deal of Kubrick in this work by Anderson although a see many, many other cinematic references to other filmmakers, films, and characters. The sense of black, bleak humor the use of music bring layers of meaning and texture to the film are so reminiscent of Kubrick and really only speaks to the mastery and maturity Anderson has achieved at a young age and with only now five films in his career. He has made his own masterpiece, a film, which resonates with the history of the conquering of the American West, and with the with the course of current events where we find ourselves addicted to the oil pumping through our veins to such a degree that we kill and destroy to secure it. There Will Be Blood is a great film and for me represents a passing on of the Directorial Torch. Paul Thomas Anderson is a Poet of Light like Altman, Welles, Houston, Kubrick, and others before him.
The Poets light but Lamps /Themselvesgo out /The Wicks they stimulate /If vital Light /Inhere as do the Suns /Each Age a Lens /Disseminating their Circumference
-Emily Dickinson