Film
There Will Be Blood
- Director
- Paul Thomas Anderson
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 158 mins
Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis: two talents so enormous that neither can be contained by the normal complement of just two names. And what a brilliant combination they make in this Huston-esque epic tale of oil, obsession, greed, corruption, madness and olde-timey religion, inspired by Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!
To save you the bother of setting a stopwatch, the answer is fourteen minutes. That’s how long it takes for anyone speak a word. Then it all comes pouring out, as Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) delivers his folksy pitch about the importance of family, community and education, his young son HW standing proudly at his side while he explains how these can be enhanced by the riches his industry generates. The wordless first act shows how he got here, beginning as a tenacious, solo turn-of-the-century prospector tearing at the parched Texan landscape with a pickaxe until he finally strikes black gold and builds up his business as an oilman in competition with giants Standard and Union Oil. Now a kid has turned up offering to trade for cash the location of his family’s farm in Hicksville, California, where oil is so plentiful it seeps through the ground. Here, Plainview encounters his informant’s brother Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), an equally devious and strong-willed Bible-bashing false prophet who has the rubes in the palm of his hand and demands a slice of those oil spoils to help construct his own evangelical empire.
Despite the combustible mix of oil and religion, this is no simple allegory. Nor is Day-Lewis’s utterly mesmerising performance as the misanthropic, increasingly deranged oilman in any way show-offy. Paul Dano (the silent kid from Little Miss Sunshine) more than holds his own as Plainview’s preacher nemesis in a couple of extraordinary showdowns. Even the dissonant, percussive, often discomforting soundtrack by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood has its part to play in the grip-tightening precision with which Anderson paces his finest film. By the time the titular blood starts to flow, Plainview’s background remains thinly sketched but we know everything about what he’s become.
It’s back on screen in the ‘shed’s Paul Thomas Anderson on 35mm February brunch season to complement the release of Phantom Thread.
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