There Will Be Blood is an old-fashioned beast of a film. A towering yarn about crude oil and God set in Texas at the turn of the 20th century. It’s a biblical parable about America’s failure to square religion and greed. But most of all it is a marvellously entertaining soap: a sort Dickens does Dallas, without the sex or swimming pools.
The year is 1898. Women have yet to be invented. And we are trapped at the bottom of a gloomy mine shaft with a familiar-looking loony who has a box of matches and a homemade stick of dynamite. This lonely prospector is Daniel Day-Lewis. He digs holes in the bleached wilderness, hoping to blast his way to a bottle of whisky if he can scrape enough silver from the rubble.
The day he accidentally hits oil is the beginning of a stormy, gripping drama about how fortune turns a hero into a monster. After bitter years of nothing, a starving ambition is uncorked in Daniel Plainview’s soul. Day-Lewis will win his second Oscar for this role. He takes possession of the film like some demonic force of nature. The rake-thin, hard-as-nails prospector shrewdly uses his first gusher to finance an empire.
By 1911 he is a fully-fledged business tycoon, mopping up oil-rich land from dirt-poor pilgrim farmers with neither the tools nor the nous to dig their own fortunes. It’s a masterclass in how the West was truly sold. Plainview wears his surname like a moral guarantee. He makes his pitches in church halls. He sells the dream of prosperity in the most benighted armpits of Texas. And he uses his 11-year-old son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), like a prop to underline his credentials as a father and respectable widower.
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The poison is as carefully hidden as his past. Day-Lewis’s entrepreneur sounds as modest and straight as Abe Lincoln. The sonorous John Huston drawl sucks the fear out of gloomy rooms. Wary farmers are disarmed by his simple words and no-nonsense charm. His ghastly ambition becomes apparent only when he clashes spectacularly with a young, evangelical minister called Eli Sunday. Eli’s tiny parish sits on top of the biggest untapped reservoir in America. Sure enough, oil seeps to the surface when Plainview sticks a finger in the dust. He tastes it like wine. The self-made tycoon and the self-appointed scourge of God are acutely aware that this much oil can transfigure their less-than-divine ambitions.
The deal these two ego-maniacs eventually strike is duly blighted by horrific accidents and ugly betrayals. What makes Paul Thomas Anderson’s film such a magnificent watch is the quality of the hypocrisy. Paul Dano’s fire-and-brimstone preacher speaks the chilly language of a cult leader. His youth makes him infinitely spooky. Every week he exorcises the Devil from a hapless member of his terrified flock. The power gives him almost sexual pleasure, and a warped idea of his self-importance.
He is a marvellous foil for Day-Lewis’s driven oil man. But not remotely in the same league. Plainview doesn’t do redemption. It doesn’t seem to matter how many holes are drilled into his conscience, he fails to spurt an ounce of regret. His contempt for human weakness has no limits. His son ceases to mean anything when he suddenly loses his hearing. The emotional ties are sliced with breathtaking cruelty. Whisky blunts whatever is left.
There is something bleak and unexpectedly moving about this old-school anti-hero. The skill with which Day-Lewis builds his performance around Plainview’s frontier tics and mannerisms is a genuine, if slightly Spartan, pleasure. The tragic obsession with oil and God is still very much with us.
12A, 158 mins