Oscar Cleanup: THERE WILL BE BLOOD review

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

**** out of 4

Rated R

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE: Best Picture, Best Director-Paul Thomas Anderson, Best Actor-Daniel Day-Lewis, Best Adapted Screenplay-Paul Thomas Anderson, Best Cinematography-Robert Elswit, Best Editing-Dylan Tichenor, Best Art Direction, Best Sound Editing

THERE WILL BE BLOOD is a slathering beast of a movie. It seems less filmed than hewn whole from granite; it's immediate, physical and can scramble your brains in one shot. It is the work of True Believers, whose zealotry towards the bygone and antiquated concept of "Great Cinema" is all-consuming. Whether or not they succeeded is up to us, as it always is. But one gets the feeling that everyone from the directors to the schmoes at craft-service were confronted with an unspoken ultimatum: make a great film or perish, forgotten on the burning sands.

We need MORE of this.

Of course we can trace this to filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson. A less generous critic could call Anderson a mimic, being as he plasters his influences on his sleeves. There's Cassavetes (HARD EIGHT), Scorsese (BOOGIE NIGHTS), Altman (MAGNOLIA) and that strange Stanley Kubrick/Charlie Chaplin love-child he made in '02 (PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE). With THERE WILL BE BLOOD, he seems to want to bring the fight to John Huston. Everything from the themes to the locales to the main character of Daniel Plainview in both performance and motivation reek of Huston's work on both sides of the camera. Here we have a man who will not quit until he is King, or perhaps God. But what does he want?

"The future, Mr. Gittes."

Daniel Plainview is Daniel Day-Lewis as a silver miner who strikes oil, and he absorbs all the wealth for himself. Over the next few years he uses that wealth to further accrue more land in California for drilling. The one place where the rest of the film is set that imbues Plainview with a sense of purpose is Little Boston, which is mainly presided over by the Sunday family, who's son Eli (Paul Dano) is the minister of a church.

One of the conditions that the Sunday family has in order to sell the land to Plainview is that Eli wants to bless the derrick at its opening. Plainview renegs on this and bad shit starts happening. Men die on the job and even Plainview's young son H.W. goes deaf in an accident.

This begins the lifelong feud between Eli and Plainview. Eli doesn't like Plainview because he sees him as an affront to his faith and his family. On Plainview's end, it's a little more interesting. Plainview doesn't have all that big of a problem with Eli as a human being, but being as he wears his faith on his sleeve, interacting with him on any cordial terms is a tacit admission that there is something out there more powerful than he is. Plainview can't have that.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD is a long and langorous character study on a grand scale. Anderson seems to have crafted a miracle, in that THERE WILL BE BLOOD is one of the best epics the cinema has ever seen, fully on par with LAWRENCE OF ARABIA or DAYS OF HEAVEN. Every single shot in this film, thanks to cinematographer Robert Elswit and production designer Jack Fisk, is so gorgeous and haunting that it can be blown up and hung on your wall. Wide open vistas, pale and forbidding forests and huge oil fires make THERE WILL BE BLOOD one of the most singularly good-looking films I have ever seen.

While at the same time Anderson maintains this scale, he also burrows into the psyche and soul of Plainview. One needs only read Hunter S. Thompson, watch the evening news or just stand on a street corner for five minutes to realize that the American Dream is responsible for more than its fair share of ego-driven monsters. Men like Warren G. Harding and Richard Nixon. Men like Dick Cheney and Michael Bay. Men like Plainview, who exist for nothing more than to acquire and expand.

But Anderson does not moralize on Plainview which, in a way, is the best kind of moralizing there is. Instead of saying "All this money and power, but to what end?" like an overwrought nun in a Frank Capra movie, Anderson realizes that for Plainview, a heap of money with no friends or family IS the end. That's what he's been striving for all his life. Fortunately for him, he existed in a time and a place that could make that possible. He is so miserable that he is completely unaware of it, thinking that he's doing the game-winning end-zone dance. By hook or by crook, he will flourish in a place, both inside and out, where no man can live.

Roger Ebert said in his review of the film that if Daniel Day-Lewis wins the Oscar for THERE WILL BE BLOOD, he should thank John Huston, being as it is an uncanny impression of the man. Normally I wouldn't bring another critic's words into my review, but given the tenor of the film, Ebert is correct. Watch this movie, then go home and pop in CHINATOWN and tell me I'm wrong. But Day-Lewis manages to out-Huston Huston, adding his own insane notes to his margins. It's breathtaking work.

So after five wonderful films at the ripe old age of thirty-seven, can we finally accept the fact that Paul Thomas Anderson is going to go down in history as one of the best filmmakers cinema has to offer? In an age of focus-grouping and homogenization, Anderson has met one of the difficult requirements that makes a director a master of the art form: He makes every movie as though it's either his first or his last. There is no middle-ground. He will die out there before he half-asses ANYTHING. He either proceeds with boundless enthusiasm, or, like with this film, he beckons us ever further, while making us think it's our idea that we're following along.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD is an American masterpiece.