When he was promoting his solo album Nothing Like the Sun, Sting gave an interview to Rolling Stone. One of the questions he was asked was why he had turned away from the type of music he had made with The Police, and instead towards what the interviewer seemed to criticize as āart rockā, to which Sting replied, āHaving made some of the simplest and most direct pop music, I don’t know whether I want to do it again.ā I wonder if something similar happened to Paul Thomas Anderson. In his first four feature films, Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love, Anderson had told stories that were emotionally direct, using bravura filmmaking and what seemed to be a deep, empathetic connection to, and understanding of, his characters, as well as of pop culture, to draw you into the characters and world he was depicting. However, after Punch-Drunk Love failed at the box office (despite being well received by critics), Anderson seemed to go in a completely different direction in his films after that. His movies have become more emotionally distant, especially in how the main characters are portrayed (the bravura filmmaking style has remained, though)*. Also, as it happens, the next four movies Anderson made since Punch-Drunk Love centered on conflict between two characters, which also is a conflict of two completely different world views, and they get resolved differently in each film. Finally, while Boogie Nights was a period piece, the other films in Anderson’s more direct period are set in the present day, but his last five films are all period films, set (mostly) in different times of the 20th century. Normally, of course, I prefer movies that hit me on an emotional level, but I’ve liked all of the movies Anderson has made since he went in this new direction, especially the first one he did, There Will Be Blood.
Loosely adapted on the novel Oil! by muckraking socialist writer Upton Sinclair (Anderson has said he only used the first 150 pages of the novel’s 528 pages, but he does borrow such elements as a preacher character, a father/son conflict, and a character loosely based on tycoon Edward L. Doheny), the film starts in 1898 New Mexico, where Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) starts out as a silver prospector. Over the next several minutes of the film, there’s almost no dialogue as we see Plainview break his leg and endure various other failures before he finally strikes it rich, not only in silver but, a few years later, oil. During this time, he also adopts the young baby son of one of his workers when the worker dies in a drilling accident. By the time 1911 rolls around (about 14-15 minutes into the film), Plainview has a small but successful company, and goes from town to town in California, presenting his adopted son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier) as his āpartnerā so he can present himself as a family man (his real partner is Fletcher Hamilton (Ciaran Hinds)), to get people to let him drill for oil near their lands. One such piece of land Plainview goes to is in Little Boston, California, where the Sunday family lives. Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), one of the sons of the patriarch, Abel Sunday (David Willis), had already alerted Plainview to the oil around the land in exchange for a price. When Plainview visits the family, Paul’s twin brother Eli (Dano, who replaced original actor Kel O’Neill two weeks into shooting), a preacher, forces Plainview to agree to spending more money than he wanted, but Plainview ends up getting the land, except for a farm nearby owned by William Bandy (Hans Howes). The already frosty relationship between Plainview and Eli deteriorates even further when Plainview breaks his promise to let Eli bless the ground before drilling commences, and accidents happen during drilling, including a blowout that causes H.W. to lose his hearing. Plainview eventually does get a pipeline built and rights to Bandy’s land, but is forced to humiliate himself at one of Eli’s services by making a public repentance of his sins. Plainview becomes even further alienated when a man name Henry (Kevin J. O’Connor) shows up, claiming to be his brother, only for that to not be the case.
Sinclair’s novel focused on the son and was along his usual lines of critiquing capitalism. Anderson seems to do the latter, except that by shifting the focus to Plainview, he’s doing it from the inside. Anderson has said he took inspiration from John Huston’s classic tale of greed, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and you could argue Plainview is cut from the same cloth as Humphrey Bogart’s character, Fred C. Dobbs, is Dobbs had survived but had become even more paranoid and isolated than he was. There’s also a bit of Michael Corleone in there, especially in how, as Coppola did in the first two Godfather films, Anderson is tracing the gradual fall of someone. The major difference, of course, is we saw Michael’s humanity before his fall, while there’s very little of that in Plainview (as he tells Henry, when he thinks he’s his brother, āI have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most peopleā), except maybe his relationship with H.W.
On the opposite side is Eli Sunday, and if Plainview represents the logical endpoint of unchecked greed in business, Eli represents his opposite number when it comes to religion. Eli may seem at first to be a lowly preacher, but in his own way, he’s as sick in the soul as Plainview is. Whereas Plainview at least tries to charm the people he’s trying to do business with, Eli, while at first trying to be charming, is out to pretty much browbeat them into submission. He does have a calm exterior at first, but underneath burns a fury that comes out when he feels he’s been betrayed, and that especially comes out in the scene where Plainview reluctantly agrees to repent for what Eli claims to be his sins. Eli is almost possessed as he goads Plainview into confessing that he abandoned H.W. (part of what makes the scene so powerful is the suggestion you get from Day-Lewis that he’s right). And when Eli goes to try and extort money from Plainview near the end, his breakdown is just as dramatic, and as chilling to watch, as Plainview’s is.
Unlike his previous period piece, Boogie Nights, which luxuriated in period detail from the late 70’s and early 80’s, the world Anderson depicts here is pretty sparse. Production designer Jack Fisk and cinematographer Robert Elswit emphasize the barren nature of the California landscape, and Elswit uses a lot of low lighting, especially in the night scenes with Plainview. Anderson and Elswit haven’t abandoned tracking shots, of course; there’s a terrific one at the blowout where H.W. loses his hearing, and we see Plainview running back with him. But for the most part, they use a lot of close and medium shots; even though the movie is of epic length (158 minutes long), this is a character study first and foremost, and those close-ups and medium shots are a way of peering at those characters up close. The score by Johnny Greenwood (of Radiohead fame) is also very different from your normal period film; even though he uses orchestras to play his music (the BBC Concert Orchestra, to be precise), Greenwood emphasizes dissonant sounds, especially in the scenes where Plainview first strikes oil, and the closing credits. This perfectly captures the emotional states of the characters. That’s also true of the classical pieces Greenwood uses in the movie, such as Brahms’ Third Movement of his Violin Concerto in D Major and Arvo Part’s “Fratres for Cello and Piano”.
Day-Lewis won his second Best Actor Oscar for his performance here (his first was for My Left Foot; he’d win his third for Lincoln), though he also had a lot of detractors for what people saw as a hammy performance (one of my co-workers at the last video store I worked at especially felt this way). I, however, thought it was riveting, and worked for the character. Day-Lewis is broadcasting his charm to hide the fact it’s facile, which is what many people who are trying too hard do (people who are naturally tough don’t have to act that way). Where he’s subtle is in showing how the hatred inside him is eating away at him inside, and that’s done mostly through his eyes. Dano may not be Day-Lewis’ equal in acting stature, but he holds his own in their scenes together, and carries himself not only as a preacher, but as a sham. To counterbalance Day-Lewis and Dano playing big, there’s a stillness to Freasier in his performance, even before his character goes deaf (as an adult, H.W. is played by Russell Harvard, an actual deaf actor). And the dependable O’Connor and Hinds are also very good. I can understand those who felt left behind at the direction Anderson went with starting with There Will Be Blood, but I think it may be his best work.
*-Only the main character of Inherent Vice is someone who can be seen as accessible. With his most recent film,Ā Licorice Pizza, Anderson seems to have returned to more accessible characters and more emotionally direct films.
