Crude Oil

By Lauren Rodrigue

The first fifteen minutes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic There Will Be Blood have no dialogue. It’s not until Daniel Day-Lewis utters one of his first, yet most poignant lines – “If I say I’m an oil man, I think you’d agree” -- that we start to see the striking similarities between our millennial selves and his turn-of-the-century Daniel Plainview. Based on Upton Sinclair’s controversial novel OIL!, Anderson’s film is out to prove we’re all “oil men”: we’re all greedy and ambitious, and we’re all drilling for something in that stark, pallid American dirt. And with our current gasoline and economy crises, now more than ever do Blood’s themes really break the fourth wall and make us all reconsider what it truly means to be thirsty.

With its sweeping views of crackly desert and brittle trees and stomach-turning close-ups of dry skin and paltry leather, There Will Be Blood is literally a thirsty film – both visually and thematically. The only liquids in the film are oil, whiskey, and sweat, all of which replace, for Daniel Plainview and his equally imprudent counterparts, the humanizing power of water. The score, which is unlike anything you will have ever heard before, recalls the droning whine of August heat bugs, accompanied during key scenes by simple dry-stick percussion. A parched exploration of greed and the corruption of humanity in times of economic strife, Anderson’s film is equal parts revolting and beautiful, addictive and heartbreaking, exhausting and exhilarating.

We meet Plainview during the pre-Depression days of the early 1900s, in the bottom of an oil well – where he will reside, sometimes literally and other times metaphorically – for the remaining two and a half hours of the film. He is immediately enviable in spirit, covered in grease and sucking in dirty oxygen through a handkerchief, shoving a giant metal pick into the muddy ground. Thus begins Day-Lewis’s Oscar-winning performance as a classic villain whom you’re not sure if you’re supposed to love or hate. After a fellow well worker dies in an accident, Plainview takes on his orphaned infant son, and raises him as his own “son and business partner,” H.W. Plainview.

And when he finally does start talking, he doesn’t stop. In an unwavering and irreproducible accent that is crumbly, nerve-wracking, grading, and piquant, Day-Lewis carries the impeccably written script wholly in the deepest part of his throat – and yes, it is dry. His character is truly an orator, one who performs with a studied effortlessness – we can practically see, and so can his audiences in the film, the written words of the script flowing from his brain to his larynx, where they are stripped and refined and slicked with grease, and then transferred to his tongue where they’re flicked outward with biting grace.

It’s Day-Lewis’s genius regurgitation of Anderson’s script that moves the otherwise conventionally “boring” plot forward. Plainview employs masterfully manipulative rhetoric to talk a mysterious visitor named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) into telling him more about Sunday’s family ranch in Little Boston, California, and the oil that may or may not be there. And when Plainview and his son venture West to investigate, they find that Little Boston is indeed rich with oil – and all he needs to use to crack the inhabitants there are a couple of slick speeches. Conflict arises when Plainview’s godless greed clashes with the only character that truly sees through him: Paul Sunday’s manically pious twin brother, Eli, the self-appointed leader of the Church of the Third Revelation (also played by Dano).

Preacher Sunday agrees to allow Plainview to drill in Little Boston at the expense of $5,000, which he will use to build the Third Revelation’s church and help propagate its message. When Plainview repeatedly snubs Sunday’s invitations to Third Revelation services and blames accidents at the derrick on Sunday’s constant preoccupation of the workers with religious fodder, their once shaky relationship becomes downright crude. As the plot thickens – including a death in the well, the arrival of a mysterious Plainview family member, and a severe calamity involving H.W. – it is the building tension between the Oil Man and the Man of God that ties everything back to the theme of greed and need, and blurs the line between good and evil.

Anderson’s script and Director of Photography Robert Elswit’s cinematography thematically enrich each other because of the contrast between the baroque dialogue and the starkly arresting visuals. Audiences will find themselves repeating aloud one of the many quotable lines of dialogue, which resonate in their heads like the sound of a spade clanking against packed dirt. They will feel like they’re sitting right beside Plainview in his makeshift Little Boston office – because the off-centered camera angles allow it so – or perhaps perched in a pew in Sunday’s infamous church, getting ghosts sucked out of them by his fevered hands. They will want to hug H.W. when he is seemingly standing right next to them and Plainview is seemingly hundreds of miles in the distance. They will inevitably leave the theatre with grease ground into their cuticles and a void in the pits of their stomachs the size of Elswit’s vast Western deserts where the moral lesson should be.

Because while the plot may seem “slow” by average conventions – such that it is based almost entirely on long, rolling bouts of dialogue, occasionally silly and ironically presented conflicts and catastrophes, and a generally unapproachable cast of morally ambiguous characters – Blood is notable in that it ends up being the kind of film that leaves you feeling like you’ve missed out on something. It leaves you confused or a little annoyed or thirsty – satisfied, but not in a moral sense. It’s one of those love/hate films – there definitely isn’t something for everyone, which is probably because not everyone wants to admit there’s a bit of Plainview and a bit of Sunday in the darkest, thirstiest parts of themselves. But the question mark that Blood leaves us with is intentional because there is never an answer to the question of who the bad guy is. At the end of the movie, and at the end of it all, all we really know is that there’s no quenching the dry hollows of human greed – no matter how deeply you dig.