There Will Be Blood

About midway into There Will Be Blood, Daniel Plainview tells a man claiming to be his brother, “I don't like to explain myself,” before drunkenly attempting to do just that.

It becomes clear over the course of the film, however, that it's not that Plainview doesn't like to explain himself – it's that he can't. This cunning and ruthless oilman who makes his fortune cheating and manipulating those he sees as his inferiors (which is to say, everyone) is a stranger to himself. He knows superficially what drives him, what he's against (again, everyone) but seems to know not from where this drive or hatred comes. There are glimpses of his pain, of a deeper conscious longing for more than conquest and money – tears after a betrayal, a longing to have “some of me” in a brother or son, a need to drink himself to sleep every night – but no real indication of its origins.

He is unnervingly sure of himself in most everything, and when there are moments of doubt, usually stemming from his strained relationship with his pre-adolescent son and business partner H.W., his frustrations boil to a rage that his body is barely able to contain.

Though Plainview the character never explains himself through dialogue, everything we need to know about him, and more, is conveyed through Daniel Day-Lewis' frighteningly nuanced portrayal. Day-Lewis is in almost every scene of the two-hour-and-40-minute movie, often occupying the frame alone, and in essence, he is the movie. The sets are impressive, the score is fine, the supporting cast convincing, but put any other actor in Plainview's role, and Blood becomes a significantly lesser film. Not only that, without Day-Lewis, the entire meaning and motivation of the film would change.

Plainview and his son travel from town to town in the early 1900s, looking for unsuspecting people to swindle for their oil. He's as ruthless as he is successful, and though eventually he could retire a millionaire at an early middle age, he continues his dealings because he knows no other way to exist. He meets with few obstacles he can't easily overcome, but in the town of New Boston, Calif., he encounters a young faith healing preacher named Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano.

Plainview sees Eli as little more than a nuisance at first, but the boy eventually transforms from unworthy opponent to someone who has made himself an impediment to Plainview's plans. Dano is, of course, not the same caliber of performer as Day-Lewis, but for this role, he doesn't need to be, and as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly enjoyable to watch his portrayal of a younger ambitious man whose deeper motives are uncertain to himself.

Day-Lewis and writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson have given us a character study unmatched in decades, and one of the few films where a single actor was almost entirely responsible for the film's success. Apt comparisons to Citizen Kane have been rampant, but while that film's concerns and triumphs were largely formal, Blood has a fairly unobtrusive narrative style, a stillness which allows Day-Lewis to set the tone and pace in any given scene.

Much credit has to be given to Anderson here. In each of his four previous films there were moments that were unnecessarily showy, the result of a filmmaker giddily drunk on his own surplus of talent. All of these films are impressive, but his propensity to show off his cleverness and understanding of American film culture would inevitably sound a false note. But here, Anderson has shed his affectations, leaving his famous meticulousness and OCD-levels of attention to detail intact. If there is one reservation to be had, it's that Anderson has retained his need to invest every other moment with a severity that's often not warranted. He wants to make sure that you're aware you're watching an important movie, a work of Art. So while nary a moment of the lengthy film feels superfluous, neither is there much breathing room.

Day-Lewis is a great physical actor, utilized to great — but near-hammy — effect most recently as Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York. There are plenty of great moments here that allow for that side of him, but his Plainview is largely constructed through constantly emoting eyes, facial tics and that incredible voice he found. Using John Huston's Chinatown character Noah Cross as a template, he's created a voice that sounds like the father you wish you had crossed with the most spiteful, cynical politician imaginable.

And while Day-Lewis is the irresistible force here, his play off of the supporting cast is what allows this. Interactions with each character deepens our understanding of Plainview, and though he's often alone in a shot, it's also interesting how often he's framed with just one other person, making his corrosiveness that much more intimate. He probably has the most complex relationship with his son, but it's his interactions with Eli Sunday that prove the most interesting, and arguably serve the larger themes of the film.

You can make as many allegorical connections as you‘d like with the oil/religion themes top-loaded in the film, as many critics have. You can also leave them, as Anderson never leads the viewer to specific geopolitical or social concerns of contemporary relevance. There Will Be Blood exists first and foremost as a convincing historical drama centered on America's oil boom in the early 1900s, and as a meticulous exploration of a difficult, powerful man.

The film is never so simple as to ask who is worse:  the conniving businessman cheating hard-scrabble farmers out of their oil, or the man of God attempting to satisfy his own glory and ego. Plainview makes it clear, in his final meeting with Eli, that he knows them both to be despicable. Only he revels in this. His way of life doesn't require the false modesty and humility that Eli's does. One gets the sense that Plainview always felt justified in his contempt for his fellow man, but has reserved a particular sense of righteous indignation for this worm.

During the film's coda, the comparisons to Citizen Kane are unavoidable, as Plainview, like Kane, suffers a fate similar to Kane's. But whereas Orson Welles framed Kane's demise as a tragedy – a self-pitying man who never found anyone to love him enough, going to his grave with thoughts of his lost childhood – Blood's finale is played as a sort of farce, with Plainview unrepentant, willing and able to heap even more abuse on a world populated with a people he finds loathsome. If this man ever lost a Rosebud, he never gave it a second thought.