There Will Be Blood

In the beginning there is darkness. And in the darkness, a man with a pickaxe claws at the earth as if he's looking for the way back in. He grunts from such heavy labour but he keeps right on digging.

Paul Thomas Anderson's fifth film - his first unalloyed masterpiece, and nothing less than a twentieth century foundation myth - shapes up like this, in stark, primitive strokes and sounds. It will be 15 minutes or more before we hear a line of dialogue. Jonny Greenwood's orchestral score cuts in with the picture: an immediately anxious, unsettling, discordant crescendo. Agitato. Taken with the gothic type of Anderson's sanguinary title, it suggests horrors are on the horizon. (Or beneath it.)

The year is 1898, and our miner (Daniel Day-Lewis) is about to make his first strike. The silver ore he discovers - even as he breaks his leg in a fall - doesn't make him wealthy overnight, but it will lay the foundation for his subsequent fortunes. We watch him scratch his name on the claim stake after he's dragged himself back to town: Daniel Plainview.

This will prove a recurring pattern, though Plainview never acknowledges it: those moments of triumph and vindication - the strikes and the gushers and the deals - will bring disaster hand in hand: death, betrayal and isolation. The more successful he becomes, the lower he will sink.

By 1902, Plainview has come up with an improved digging operation - a prototype derrick - and he's on the verge of a more important discovery: oil. He has a team of men under him now. There's even a baby in the camp. The infant's father anoints him with a dab of the black stuff, a mock religious gesture that might invite a blessing or a curse. Minutes later an accident orphans the child and the boss is left bouncing the baby on his knee.

The boy - H.W - is seven years old when the first words flow. They take the form of a lengthy introduction as Plainview presents his credentials to a town licensing drilling rights - outside, oil is literally running down the street.

It is a speech we will hear several times over the next two hours; each time honed a little more cleverly (perhaps "refined" is a better word). It is a speech that says, 'You can trust me, I am oilman, I know what I am doing and I am not here to swindle you. I am a family man like you. We value children and community and prayers, and we will prosper together.'

Already Plainview presents himself as an upright and prosperous fellow. He is well dressed in the Western manner, and there's nothing of the roughneck about him. He's assiduously well-spoken, formal and polite. His voice is deep, honeyed and mellifluous (did Daniel Day-Lewis mean to echo John Huston? Regardless it's a staggering performance on a physical and psychological level, a brilliant depiction of aging and mental - and spiritual - disintegration). Part of the drama's pull is gauging Plainview's sincerity in these dealings, and recognizing the extent to which his entire pitch is horsewash.

Well, he is an oilman; that much is true. But it's soon apparent (even if we couldn't guess) he'll swindle as best he may, and he couldn't give two hoots for the rest.

Later, when he sets up in Little Boston, his office will stand at one end of town. Eli Sunday's (Paul Dano) Church of the Third Revelation will stand across the way at the other. (The first revelation was Moses. The second was Jesus Christ. The third may or may not be pending) They're the first two permanent constructions this side of the station, the twin pillars of a burgeoning tent city. Plainview talks piously to appease the natives, but he's astonished when he ventures in one time and sees Eli's evangelical preaching (a bravura one-take turn by Dano, the elective mute from Little Miss Sunshine). It takes a fake to know a fake. "Goddam hell of a show," he mutters.

That goes double for Anderson's amazing movie: it is a goddam hell of a show. A bit of showboat in Magnolia and Boogie Nights (much as I love them), PTA reveals a new discipline and maturity here. It's a conscious throwback to classical cinema - at various times it evokes silent movies, von Stroheim's Greed, for instance; Kubrickian black comedy; the western and the monster movie. Anderson has talked about Plainview as a vampire figure - blood and oil running together like shit and money in a Freudian dream reading. He's alone in this world, but a blood brother to those terrifying capitalist kingpins in Citizen Kane, and Chinatown, and even Deadwood.

Greed consumes Daniel; it festers in his male emptiness and pride. He is a self-made man, or tries to be, and the movie comprehends the crushing futility of that beast; the anger and self-loathing.

"Are you are an angry man? Are you envious?" Plainview demands of one, short-lived intimate. "I have a competition in me," he confesses. "I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people." And then he smiles.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

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