There Will Be Blood (2007)

(NOTE: This was written early in January of 2008, before the Coen Brothers took home Best Picture for No Country for Old Men. I'm still smarting over that one.)

With Oscar season upon us and the awards ceremony just around the corner, I submit for your consideration what may be the only perfect movie of 2007: Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.

From the director of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, Anderson’s latest tells the story of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a rising self-made oil magnate attempting to strike black gold in the small religious community of Little Boston. Plainview, after successfully leasing enough land to begin drilling, crosses paths with Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a healer/preacher in Little Boston and the only person who may be able to match wits with Plainview.

To distill the movie into a mere battle between two men, however, would be to do the film a gross injustice. There Will Be Blood is many things: an epic about a Machiavellian capitalist’s boundless ambition to conquer, the story of a man’s self-imposed meteoric rise and plummeting fall from glory, or even a Marxist commentary on the parallel malevolences of capitalism and religion. But the one thing it’s not is simple. Even the film’s last line – “I’m finished!” – has at least four different levels of meaning apparent on the first viewing alone.

To the best of my knowledge, Martin Scorsese’s 2006 gangster blockbuster The Departed was the last perfect movie Hollywood churned out. Don’t get me wrong; 2007 has been a year of great movies – Sweeney Todd, Juno, and No Country for Old Men come to mind – but seldom does a movie come along that commands a second viewing like There Will Be Blood does.

I might add that my second viewing came exactly twenty-four hours after my first viewing, and though the film was still fresh in my mind Anderson offers so much at once that it’s impossible to catch everything in one go.

Day-Lewis as Plainview is one of those offerings. Day-Lewis, who previously took home a Best Actor Oscar playing disabled artist Christy Brown in 1989’s My Left Foot, is almost guaranteed to win this year’s Best Actor award. Though Johnny Depp was delightful as the musically murderous barber Sweeney Todd, he can’t hold a candle to Day-Lewis, who commands attention from the first scene to the last line. It’s impossible to look at anyone else while Day-Lewis is onscreen, so commanding is his performance.

Even Dano, who performed admirably both here and in Little Miss Sunshine, comes up short against the Day-Lewis juggernaut. Playing the dual role of twins Paul and Eli Sunday (Eli being the more prominent of the two), Dano is suitably over-the-top as he delivers quack sermons but also beautifully pathetic as he questions God’s “mysteries” in the last reel of the film.

Though this was my first Paul Thomas Anderson outing, I’ll be sure to check out more films in the canon, since Anderson’s direction here is non-pareil. The first fifteen minutes, in what feels like an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, elapse in virtual silence; the only dialogue – save for a brief gasp of “No!” – comes from those inevitably chatty people sitting behind you. From there on, Anderson launches through a tour de force portrait of turn-of-the-century California, complete with what I understand are his trademark long takes. As a film fan madly in love with long takes, extended scenes such as the one where Plainview meets his brother Henry are breathtaking. And the soundtrack, which at times sounds like a train whistle that crescendos into a swarm of bees, is instrumental in building the suspense that Anderson so effortlessly crafts.

But where Anderson truly shines as a filmmaker comes about halfway into the film, when one of the characters is permanently deafened by a drilling accident (to divulge that character’s identity would be a criminal revelation). Anderson deftly switches between shots of the flaming derrick and close-ups of the newly-deafened character, accompanied by only the swooshing noise of what the deaf character can only hear.

There Will Be Blood, as I’ve said, is one of that rare breed of “perfect movie.” When the film was over, I sat in stunned silence, desperately trying to catch my breath and looking around frantically for an usher with an oxygen tank. Seldom does a movie take my breath away like this one did, and even rarer is the film that I must see a second time in the same weekend – let alone threaten to drag all my friends to see.

The last ten minutes of the film, which more than live up to the title, are as gripping as anything I’ve seen in a film in a long time. With my hand clasped over my mouth, I watched as Day-Lewis took the film beyond great and into perfection, all with the line “I drink your milkshake!” And both times I watched in rapt horror as the film’s final, tragic moments played out like some inexorable Greek tragedy.

At one point, Plainview tells his brother, “I look at people, and I see nothing worth liking.” Yet when I look at There Will Be Blood, I see not just a movie that I liked, but a movie that demands to be liked.