If Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of such zeitgeist-y pop culture films as “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia” wanted to make a creative 180, keep things fresh for himself and keep his devotees on their toes, then mission fucking accomplished.
A singular experience from a unique auteur (and perhaps now a slightly disturbed one), “There Will Be Blood,” is not a change of pace; it’s a radical departure of the highest order. This could scare off some of his hipster audiences uninterested in a film about the turn-of-the-century petroleum boom in California, but so be it. This is a now a filmmaker that has stepped beyond the ‘Pulp Fiction-y’, culturally au courant moment. A new threshold is achieved here; an unknown landscape that blackens the souls of its characters and audience alike.
A loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel “Oil!,” (based on early oil tycoons like John Rockefeller and Edward Doheny), PTA revisits the West once again but from a historical setting and era seemingly out of his element and drastically different from the rest of his oeuvre.
A sprawling epic saga of greed, lust, seduction, fervent faith and family, the film is built around the corrosively potent performance of Daniel Day-Lewis whos plays the menacing Daniel Plainview, a hardscrabble prospector who turns himself into a bonafide self-made oil tycoon and a monster full of rancor.
He adopts a son H.W., in an oil-well accident (newcomer Dillon Freasier) and a few short years later has a burgeoning family business on his hands. A strange mysterious “ocean of oil” tip leads him West and his son and his assistant descend like a shadow on an unsuspecting dust-tattered town called Little Boston.
Plainview soon crosses paths with the town’s popular and upcoming preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), whose fervent sermons wield their own seductive influence. The two diametrically opposed figureheads of the town soon clash and build to an inevitable fever-pitched collision.
Destined for a pantheon of greatness, ‘Blood’ references “Citizen Kane,” “Giant,” and the insatiable gold-lust of “The Treasure of Sierra Madre.” More significantly, it vibrates the haunting and disquieting tones of Stanley Kubrick which are disconcerting to say the least.
Which brings us to Jonny Greenwood’s very-Kubrickian score with many nods to “The Shining,” a film that Greenwood and PTA both have said influenced the musical mood and they weren’t kidding.
Greenwood’s unnerving score isn’t essential to the film, it makes the film and elevates the ghastly tenor with disconcerting bolts of strings, murmuring orchestral quietude, and disconcerting dissonance and timpani that pounds away like an incoming storm of killer bees. It bleeds portentous dread and a few times the haunting score is juxtaposed with rather innocuous scenes to masterfully insidious effect.
We were honestly skeptical as we do get when rock people write scores and thought perhaps it might be novelty-esque, but its intense, chilling, and throbbing themes were unforgettable; we were absolutely blown away by it. There’s no way in hell Greenwood isn’t getting nominated for Best Oscar Score, his approach is too unique, too leftfield, too different and bloodcurdling not to get noticed. It literally could have been a completely different movie without his eerie, creepy, spidery work.
Daniel Day-Lewis committed to the script when it was only ¾ complete and had two years to work and research the role before funding and everything else was set into place and his performance (sometimes deliciously over-the-top) is something to behold. His misanthropic Plainview is a powder keg of boiling fury, the apex of terror; a singular force of wretchedness, bile and contempt. The script allows him moments of dark, extremely twisted humor and stop-on-a-dime moments of terrifying hatred and revenge. Day-Lewis’ portrayal of the voracious magnate is nothing short of a transcendent reckoning.
Back to the hipster audience, ‘Blood’ is for the serious movie-goer, not the one who just goes to see Michel Gondry movies in the theaters. The film is anxiety-inducing, exhilarating and exhausting, but damn if it isn’t one of the most visceral experiences of the year – one that jostles your senses and makes you tense and near panic-stricken at times.
The first thing we asked ourselves when we were done seeing it was, ‘How in god’s name did any studio LET him make this picture?’ That’s not a pejorative, it’s just unbelievable that a film this dark, this misanthropic and this seemingly-noncommercial got funded. Thank god for cinematical miracles. The world of movies would be a smaller place without films like this one.
Flaws? ‘Blood’ does tend to unravel somewhat in the last act; the transportation of setting (20 years later) being somewhat jarring and the film does lose some momentum, but the final scene is so jaw dropping, so off the reservation and chock full of lunacy, that it makes up for any forward drive that’s lost.
PTA shows a side of himself we’ve never seen and proves himself to be a filmmaker of a new class, reaching an upper echelon that leaves his hip, ‘90s contemporaries far behind. ‘Blood’ is a masterwork; it’s a maelstrom of operatic sweep that will leave you speechless and awed for days. [A+]
Soundtrack Bonus Cuts
FYI, the newly opened Nonesuch digital store is offering three bonus cuts – orchestral versions of “HW / Hope of New Fields” and “Prospectors Quartet” plus the new track “De-Tuned Quartet” – not available on the original sountrack. You can hear two cuts from Greenwood’s score below.
