There Will Be Blood

Someone told me they signed up for a film class after seeing There Will Be Blood. It's that kind of film. In it, everything has so much character, down to things environmental – sere landscape, searing light, and insidious oil – I was reminded of everything cinema can be. Especially the light. Look for the cross in the church of Eli Sunday, and ask yourself Has salvation ever looked so burning? Today so many movies look like video games or a series of monochrome color swatches (this is a warm scene, this is a cool scene), Blood always looks like film.

Blood traces the rise and fall of Daniel Plainview; a man whom greed drives, then devours. There's room enough in the complex structure of Blood for three main plots, each based on Daniel's relationship with another character: H.W. Plainview, Daniel's adopted son via a sort of anti-Immaculate Conception; Eli Sunday, a preacher and showman weirdly reminiscent of modern televangelists; and Henry Brands, a con man. The heart of Blood, an opposition of similar men, is between Daniel and Eli, whose games of power escalate to some of the title's promised gore. Director Paul Thomas Anderson found the perfect actors for these roles, Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview and Paul Dano as Eli Sunday, and the best scenes are when both actors are onscreen, each playing off the other. To these two men, Capitalism is a form of bullying, and maybe murder (hardly surprising considering the film is loosely based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!), and Christianity is only another form of capitalism.

Well acted, well shot, good script, interesting themes ... Blood slots neatly into film criticism and history as a masterpiece. David Denby has already proclaimed it as “... work that bears comparison to the greatest achievements of Griffith and Ford.” It's such a nice (both pretty and precise) film that it seems mean to bring up that a film about white men and their big, gushing oil towers (shooting oil, the film's anti-semen: black instead of white, destructive instead of creative), may not be the direction American cinema should head. And yet, might there be a queer reading of Daniel Plainview? Certainly, there is a complete absence of women in his life, and all his relationships are with men. When Daniel suggests a trip to get some girls, it is his male companion who gets drunk and chases women. Daniel stays sober and alone. Perhaps Daniel is not attracted to women? We're given no solid evidence either way. We do see that what Daniel comes to truly love is the domination of others, to the point of losing his humanity. What makes this process of loss so interesting is that Daniel seems to have genuine warmth, even joy, in him at the beginning of the film. At the end I wondered whether this initial impression was only an illusion.