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'Blood' the kind of epic Hollywood likes
Movie Review: There Will Be Blood
By John Wirt
jwirt@theadvocate.com
Advocate movie critic
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There Will Be Blood is one of those decades-spanning epics upon which Hollywood loves to bestow Academy Awards. The Daniel Day-Lewis-starring, Paul Thomas Anderson-directed tale of oil and greed received eight Oscar nominations this week.
There Will Be Blood is beautifully assembled and Day-Lewis gives one of his finer performances. His character, early 20th-century oil man Daniel Plainview, is a mesmerizing study of a driven captain of industry. Plainview, at least in the early part of the story, is a slick salesman, a persuasive man who lies as easily as he charms, as effortlessly as he breathes.
Inspired by Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel, Oil!, the story begins in 1898. Plainview is a silver and gold prospector in California hacking precious metals from darkness and rock. Skipping to 1902, the wily Plainview is on to something far more promising than California’s tapped-out mines, that flowing black gold called oil.
Plainview leads a primitive oil-drilling operation. The danger of the job yields him a son, the child of a worker gruesomely killed in a well pit calamity.
The oil-man on the rise calls the boy H.W. and introduces him to all as his own son. That’s a lie, but Plainview knows that being a good family man will score family value points with ignorant townsfolk who have riches beneath their feet.
There’s no dialogue during the first few scenes of There Will Be Blood. It’s a curious device, as is the character of Plainview. Though this man of the West is brilliantly presented by Day-Lewis, Plainview remains an enigma. Writer-director Anderson offers only the slightest explanation of him. Why is Plainview such a solitary man? Why does this charming man grow so belligerent?
Plainview forges an alliance with Eli Sunday, the baby-faced young man who leads the Church of the Third Revelation in the poor town of Little Boston, but soon despises this passionate preacher who claims to be a healer.
Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine) gives Sunday a wide-eyed, bizarre piety. Anderson almost too manipulatively sets the preacher up as a deeply religious man who’s also deeply connected to the material world. In Little Boston, Plainview has no monopoly on scheming.
Plainview’s son, H.W., is the other principal in this expansive American tale. When H.W. is an enfant, his true father picks him up and dabs freshly harvested oil on the child’s forehead. Is it a blessing or a curse?
Dillon Freasier, plucked from the small town of Fort Davis, Texas, co-stars as H.W. Anderson and his casting director found just what they needed in Freasier, a 10-year-old, first-time actor who’s a natural alongside the inscrutable man who may well wish he were H.W.’s real father. Whatever love exists in There Will Be Blood derives from their relationship.
Even if There Will Be Blood didn’t lurch forward in time, Plainview’s transformation would be tricky. Because viewers know almost nothing about him, there’s no foundation from which to comprehend his deeds.
Some characters on film, such as Javier Bardem’s psycho killer in No Country For Old Men, can appear on screen and be instantly understood, but Plainview needs more progression and definition of character. Other things, too, especially weak, reaching developments in the third act, make the often commendable There Will Be Blood a lesser epic.
