Paul Thomas Anderson's strange and feverish "There Will Be Blood" is so wonderful in parts — Daniel Day-Lewis' sensational lead performance, Jonny Greenwood's brilliantly counter-intuitive score and the bare-bones-and-boards production design of Jack Fisk — that watching it collapse in calamitous miscalculation at the end is singularly distressing.
The picture is set amid the California oil boom at the turn of the last century. Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, an iron-willed prospector who strikes it rich and then, with his young adopted son (Dillon Freasier) in tow, sets out to build an empire by buying up land from under the spreading tentacles of the similarly rapacious Standard Oil Company. Plainview is a master of the honey-dripping business proposition (Day-Lewis appears to have modeled his vocal inflections on those of John Huston in 1974's "Chinatown," another California origin story). But in attempting to snooker the impoverished Sunday family out of its oil-rich ranch, he earns the enmity of young Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a teen evangelist and budding fraud, who sees in Plainview a heaven-sent opportunity to finance the building of his own spiritual empire.
The movie resonates with our memories of old films like "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," "Elmer Gantry" and, especially, "Citizen Kane." Unlike "Kane," though, it tells us nothing about what turned Daniel Plainview into the heartless sociopath that he is. He cheats and schemes and has only contempt for other people — even, in the end, his son, who has been his sole companion. (Has Plainview ever had a relationship with a woman? One brief scene suggests a brittle misogyny; but there are no significant female characters in the movie, and the subject is never probed.) Anderson's script — which is drawn very approximately from Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel, "Oil!" — presents Plainview as a Biblical force of nature, uncomplicated by human dimensions. This becomes problematic, though, when we are asked to contemplate the character's loss of his soul — we've been given no reason to suspect he had one in the first place.
Thus deprived of the possibility of plumbing any human emotional depths, Day-Lewis nevertheless barrels past the story's structural deficiencies with the hair-raising intensity of his performance. He conjures up Plainview's utter despicability — a cold-blooded predator cloaking himself in seductive moral homilies — with electrifying verve. Bestriding the picture's parched scrublands and primitive oil rigs in his high-button suits and patriarchal mustache, he's hypnotically persuasive as a vintage monster of avarice and duplicity. In comparison, Paul Dano, as his wheedling nemesis, Eli, is overmatched — with his unformed features and sometimes recessive delivery, he never quite comes into focus. But Dano plunges boldly into Eli's messianic rants, and his shifty watchfulness is memorable on a smaller scale.
You might expect a picture like this — a tale of late-frontier times — to be scored with banjos and pennywhistles. But Anderson made an audacious decision to have Jonny Greenwood, the classically trained Radiohead guitarist, write and record the film's soundtrack themes. The music is an orchestral wash of beautifully harmonized melodies spiked with thoroughly modern dissonance, and while it's a jarring accompaniment for some of the imagery, it stands on its own as a series of superbly astringent compositions. (The soundtrack is available on CD.)
"There Will Be Blood" may be Anderson's most ambitious movie, but it's not his best. Its most impressive element — the astonishing vitality of Day-Lewis' performance — appears to have led the director astray at crucial points. In two key scenes — an over-the-top church baptism and an off-the-rails confrontation between Plainview and Eli that ends the picture (and almost sinks it) — Anderson seems to have been so overawed by the actor's mastery that he abandoned control of the action and let Day-Lewis have free rein. The result is that rare dramatic flaw: too much of a good thing.
"There Will Be Blood" is a Paramount Vantage release. Paramount and MTV are both subsidiaries of Viacom.
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