A turn-of-the-century prospector traverses the burnt earth in the glare of the New Mexico sun. It looks like Mars and might as well be for all the hospitality it affords. The otherworldliness of it chimes out in Jonny Greenwood’s angular score. And for a lengthy prologue that’s all we hear. It’s left to the harsh, wordless misadventures down a mineshaft to tell us anything else we need to know. It’s a fitting overture for an audacious, impossibly grand film that, like many weighty novels, might well be subtitled ‘America’.
The frontier capitalist we are following is Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis), a man who seems determined to master man and god as well as the oil-rich ground beneath his feet. Travelling through the west with a young boy (Freasier) he refers to as his son and business partner, Plainview is guided by animalistic anger and ruthless avarice. With minimum effort he and junior swindle their way into the buxom of a town full of rubes only too happy to sign away their fortunes. Across the way, local revival tent preacher Eli Sunday (Dano) recognises Plainview for the malignant thing he is but in this instance, it takes one to know one.
The stage is set for an epic showdown. But it’s just one of many Greek cycles in a film that expands its jaws to incorporate both fraternal and Oedipal tragedies. Everything about There Will Be Blood is similarly outsized, from Day-Lewis’s gargantuan performance to the vast landscape, a setting borrowed from the similarly themed but infinitely soapier Giant. This is every inch an American film and every aspect, every detail is delivered in the supersized portions we’ve come to expect from that land.
Mr. Anderson, meanwhile, is shooting for the stars, touching on everything from Erich von Stroheim’s Greed to The Searchers to Citizen Kane. Like those sacred texts, this is at heart a tale of madness and the strange shapes it throws leave us unsure if what we’re watching is real or imagined.
A final bloody denouement in a bowling alley, heavily signposted as diseased fancy, makes a suitable bow for a piece of cinema that unfolds in a strangely mythic, nightmarish space. And this is a piece of cinema – not a movie, not even a film, but a pure, startling piece of cinema. It’s ironic that the director seems to have far more scope without the densely populated ensembles (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) that catapulted him to fame. But he dedicates the film to his mentor Robert Altman just the same.