THERE WILL BE BLOOD

There will be frowns. There will be shrugs of confusion. There will be jeers, possibly. There may even be quixotic attempts to find Meaning – something about the shotgun-wedding of Business and Religion in American culture – but, having watched There Will Be Blood twice now, I’m convinced it doesn’t have much to say. Yes, there’s a businessman – Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), an “oilman” in the early 20^th century, churning out black gold from the rocky innards of the Western landscape. Yes, there’s a preacher – Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), healing and prophesying at the Church of the Third Revelation. Yes, they cross paths. Yes, they’re forced to deal with each other (though they secretly loathe each other). But religious hypocrisy is much less integral to the story than a different kind of hypocrisy, the ‘family values’ peddled by the oilman (more on this later) – and even that seems relatively low on director Paul Thomas Anderson’s list of priorities. Despite the running-time, PTA isn’t out to make an epic. As he did in his last film, Punch-Drunk Love (2002), he’s out to make a character study of a strange, tormented character, mostly replacing scene-by-scene narrative with outlandish set-pieces and a hypnotic, overbearing music score.

Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar as Plainview. It is, you have to say, an immense performance, carrying every scene of a 158-minute movie (except perhaps the one where Eli ‘cures’ a woman of arthritis, played in the broad hammy style of the most egregious evangelical hucksters: “I will gum you!”). There’s just one problem, which is that Plainview wears a mask. He’s opaque. “I don’t like to explain myself,” he says. The film drafts in a new character – Daniel’s half-brother – in the second half, expressly for the purpose of getting Daniel to open up, but still only manages to hint at his untapped reservoirs of loneliness and misanthropy. Day-Lewis, in effect, is playing a character who’s playing a character, and the actor falls back on theatricality, pursing his lips and puffing out his cheeks behind a bushy moustache. Unable to penetrate Plainview, the film falls back on endlessly suggesting the tensions within him: the dissonant score (by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead) catches on the same motifs over and over, evoking a stasis and frustration that can only be resolved by a violent explosion. Blood is punctuated with explosions, literal and metaphorical. The first makes Plainview rich. The second takes away his son. The last one explains the film’s title.

There’s at least one obvious tension roiling behind our hero’s businesslike exterior. This no-nonsense paragon of “plain speaking” is actually a liar, claiming to be accompanied by his “wonderful son H.W.” when in fact the boy is an orphan he adopted as a baby, his real father – Plainview’s employee – having been killed in a drilling accident. PTA (or Upton Sinclair, on whose 1927 book ‘Oil!’ the film is based) is too smart to make this a cynical lie; man and boy dote on each other, and there’s a great early scene when baby H.W. seems transfixed by Daniel’s moustache. But it’s a lie nonetheless, and it eats away at Plainview – especially since he picked up the boy for business reasons, hoping a child’s face would sway small-town rubes into giving him drilling rights (being a “family man” gives him an edge over the competition). We learn very little about Plainview, but one thing we learn – one of the few things he vouchsafes about himself – is that he’s always wanted children, and it’s never revealed why he doesn’t have any of his own (“I don’t like to talk about those things”) but it’s clear his relationship with H.W. is special. In fact, it’s second only to his relationship with oil. Oil gives him a son, and oil takes him away.

There Will Be Blood is best viewed as a rich man’s descent into madness (comparisons have been made to Citizen Kane (1941), which also ends with its protagonist alone and embittered in a huge mansion) – and what creates the madness is the knowledge of living a lie. In a weird way, the film is about language. Plainview is a silver-tongued salesman, swaying congregations with his promise of riches and progress, yet the early scenes – the drilling itself – are played entirely without dialogue, as if to say the Truth lies in physicality, in crawling and heaving and wresting out the Earth’s riches by sheer painful muscle. The rest is a veneer, just like Eli’s florid preaching is a veneer. That’s why Plainview hates the preacher – and that’s why, after H.W. becomes a deaf-mute, his ‘father’ slowly abandons him. Stripped of language, the boy reminds him too much of the elemental truths behind his life. That his work is a kind of violence done to the Earth. That ‘business’ goes hand-in-hand with exploitation. And perhaps, when this damaged child requires unconditional love, that he’s not his real father.

Honesty is paramount here (“Answer me directly!” Plainview tells his brother). Note that Daniel Day-Lewis plays a man named Daniel – in the book he was called ‘Joe Ross’ – while Paul Dano plays twins named Paul and Eli: Paul, we’re told, is the good one, Eli the “false prophet”. Trouble is, these are undercurrents. We can tease them out – rightly or wrongly – but PTA doesn’t divulge much, one way or the other. Clearly, guilt makes Daniel a bad businessman: pouncing on a stray, well-meant remark about his son, he insults a fellow oilman and destroys his reputation in the business world. Clearly, he’s torn between contempt for others’ hypocrisy (especially Eli’s) and the need to confront his own. Clearly, PTA takes risks, but he isn’t very good at expressing feelings: it’s surely no coincidence that both this and Punch-Drunk Love focus on recessive, repressed heroes. The film is spectacular, baroque and frustrating, leaving out a lot of connective tissue. By the end, with Day-Lewis slithering and weaving like Walter Matthau in gibbering-shyster mode – plus the now-classic line “I drink your milkshake!” – it demands to be viewed as black comedy. It may be the least commercial Best Picture Oscar nominee since The Thin Red Line 10 years ago; I dread to think what the Saturday-night audience will make of it. In a word, there will be puzzlement.