There was so much hullaballoo this year about the death of cinema, as though Bergman and Antonioni took the idea of light shining through celluloid at 24 frames per second with them up into movie heaven, never to be heard of again.  All those daft doomsday intellectuals with patches on their elbows should have waited a few months to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, an epic, taller than any tall tale of a movie about the grandiose rise and fall of one American, Daniel Plainview (the truly brilliant Daniel Day Lewis).  Can one movie, clocking in at 2 hours and 45 minutes, say more about the current state of our country than all the left wing namby pamby movies put out by other more established directors this year (Redacted, Rendition, The Garden of Elah, The Kingdom, A Mighty Heart, blah blah blah blah)?  The answer is an emphatic YES.

This hefty piece of cinema is definitely a layered work – it often feels like a Kubrick or Antonioni movie – the Jonny Greenwood score is often alienating, strange, other worldly, like the 2001 score.  Sometimes it feels like a piece of great European cinema, from Visconti, or Tarkovsky, following the broad sweep of history across the lives of a few regular people – but this film is completely, and utterly drenched in purely American fixations: oil, religion, capitalism, greed, success, ambition, failure.  And what one will find amazing upon viewing this film is that this is the same mind that gave us Boogie Nights and Magnolia.  Paul Thomas Anderson, definitely for the better, has left behind the sprawling ironic ensemble drama for something more insinuating, more sharp and decisive in its commentary and visual presentation.  The palette of the film is perfectly muted; the colors of turn of the century California are beautiful and dusty, but all of it is about to be mined and raped and pillaged for the profit of a few.

What also is striking about this tale is it often seems like Upton Sinclair was alive and writing this book just a year or two ago.  When a baby is anointed so un-ironically with a smear of oil across his forehead, it almost feels like a direct commentary on our Bush endtimes.  Daniel Plainview’s constant bugbear is a young evangelical preacher, played with often creepy enthusiasm by Paul Dano (the silent brother in Little Miss Sunshine) – his fervor and religious madness is definitely something of our times as well.

Do not be afraid of this movie even though its title indeed rings true.  Greed will turn into frustrated violence, as it usually does in cinematic endeavors…but unlike in Citizen Kane, a film There Will Be Blood has been likened to – there is no sled, no sign or signifier of redemption, no dream of actual happiness to soften the blows.  In the end, all we have left is a stunning portrait of an American entrepreneur.  In Daniel Plainview’s hate-filled eyes, so purely focused on the pursuit of success, survival, and money, we can see a great deal of our own world.

More:
David Denby on There Will Be Blood
Daniel Day Lewis Interview (L.A. Times)
Trailer for There Will Be Blood