There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood is an extraordinary movie, more in the way it is acted and the way it sounds than anything else. That's probably not saying much to a director who probably wants to hear that it looks fabulous too. OK yeah well it does. But in a subtle way - almost too subtle to be noticed against the powerful drama of the story of the unforgettable character Daniel Plainview.

In some ways, this is the kind of story you might believe would be made about the head character of HBO's Deadwood. You know, the ugly corrupt owner of the brothel. But to be a brothel owner is something of a mediocrity, which is in the end, the failing of all of HBO's dramas despite their fascinating writing and compelling casts. Who cares about the self-doubts of a mafioso? Well, the answer quite plainly are those people at whose level of power he approaches in their own moral ambiguity - in other words Hollywood producers, actors and directors. The little millionaires. In some ways, this movie is on that same scale. Surely the producers of There Will Be Blood made promises and created their own town as moviemakers, just as Daniel Plainview did as an oilman.

This is the story of the hardest hard-scrabble rock picking prospector who figured out how to make money from digging under the man-killing earth. As he rises in success and fame, he is revealed by degrees to be a misanthrope, a man who takes great pains to conceal the fact that he has little concern for the mass of humanity and moves sharklike through them because they happen to greatly desire the one thing he knows better than anyone else - how to get oil out of the ground.

He is haunted by the fact that simple men who do not match his cunning or ruthlessness often block his path, and the story is about how he manages the precarious balance between hatred, greed, co-dependency, and social acceptability. He is a man who seduces and then exploits everyone but a precious few, those he needs most in order to keep the oily shark of his soul swimming forward.

I have not read Upton Sinclair, and I thank my lucky stars that I didn't or else I might have been irredeemably Leftist. I can recall asking on occasion what book did I need to read to understand America - the most important book of all. And I can remember hearing time and time again that it was Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle". I was fortunate enough to read Howard Zinn as a full-grown man instead of an impressionable collegian. And so armed with that skepticism I approached this film knowing that it was based on one of Sinclair's books. But the film itself was so masterful that it was easy to sink all of the messages into the character of Plainview. In otherwords, this is not a metaphorical film. It didn't have to be historical. It was exactly what it needed to be: the story of a driven, fascinating, megalomaniac who was born of days when you could order goat's milk at a bar and when literacy came from the Holy Bible and nowhere else.

The music in this film was extraordinary. It just so happens that I watched Cool Hand Luke this week too. Very much the same way Lalo Schifrin raised tension with seemingly incongruously modernistic music against a rustic background, the score for There Will Be Blood has a stark, dramatic, relentless quality that overcomes the need for dialog.

There are visuals burned into memory from There Will Be Blood. There are no clippy montages. The film takes its time in ordinary action that would be cut from lesser films. We don't get to guess what happens off camera and make assumptions in our minds. The camera follows every moment. Horses walk through trees. A man runs after his boy into the dark and returns with him, panting. An oil derrick burns in the evening and black smoke drifts towards the western sunset. Grubby fingers write pencil marks onto graph paper and a design emerges. A body in a grave is face down in water and the digger kicks in the leg caught on the grave wall. A man facing away from the camera is snoring on the floor and another man tries to awaken him - the camera doesn't change angles. A man meets his son after an absence, the camera stays 50 yards away from the embrace. It is such an unusual movie to see that it makes most other movies seem somehow rushed and undone.

Daniel Day Lewis owns the film of course. His Plainview is unromantically honest, a man of little pretense. A man who simply is a force, whose economy with words allows for no flattery. He is unconcerned with his fate and drinks himself to sleep, yet will not abide the insinuation that he has mismanaged his personal life. Plainview has no personal life, his family doesn't exist, and yet it is the only value he honors outside of his business dealings. There is only his son, H.W. whose deafness robs Plainview of a confidante until a stranger comes claiming to be Plainview's half-brother. Plainview feels betrayed by both in the end, and betrays them back. He is the man without trust, he is the man who believes that God plays dice with the universe.

There Will Be Blood is another contemporary film that serves to entertain us by bringing us in close tactile proximity to the earth. It is perfectly designed for the majority of us urbanites with DVD players and jobs that rarely cost people their lives. It allows us to touch raw nature and raw lives and raw betrayal and raw ambition all born of the earth. It is a dusty, oily, gritty film in which fresh faces suffer hardships we rarely do. A girl is beaten for not praying. A baby's bottle nipple is sterilized with whiskey. A laborer is dragged from a drill hole having been crushed by falling machinery.  This is not, however, a costume drama. It is something of a slow motion psychological thriller. We watch a man consumed by ambition bulldog his way through life, a pugilistic king, a semi-gracious Machiavel, a man among men who cannot enjoy a moment's joy that doesn't serve his own purposes. Daniel Plainview is, in many ways, just as uncivil as the earth, just as oblivious to his own nature as nature is. He is as predictable as the tides, and as deadly and unforgiving as the deep. He is the very extension of earth, the God of Oil, and There Will Be Blood is his myth.