It s sprung up from an year old old Upton Sinclair novel. But the movie has a stunning biblicality. In the beginning the turn of the last century there was a man. The man dug a hole in the earth. The hole went deep. The man plunged a great metal spike into . It s sprung up from an year old old Upton Sinclair novel. But the movie has a stunning biblicality. In the beginning the turn of the last century there was a man. The man dug a hole in the earth. The hole went deep. By the bucket the man and his crew hauled it up. The juice was called oil. The oil made him wealthy. The wealth made him powerful. The power made him crazy. The filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson puts us right up close to this mustached oilman. Plainview is a gathering storm. This alluring visionary has a seductive authority scary beady eyes and John Huston s diabolical diction. Yet he goes so far beyond homage or mere embodiment. Daniel Day Lewis is something else here. He s the smo! ke the ash the lava and the volcano. He doesn t need him to. We re down there with Plainview scraping at the bowels of the earth. His wheezing accounts for the only lines of dialogue for about the first minutes. Dirt cakes the fingernails. Oil smears the camera lens. I marveled at some of the labor being done on screen and thought of Abel Gance D. Griffith and King Vidor how those men built epics out of the cumulative force of real on screen horsepower. Anderson s movie takes full advantage of its medium to show us the infernal birth of an industry. There Will Be Blood is anti state of the art. It s the work of an analog filmmaker railing against an increasingly digitized world. In that sense the movie is idiosyncratic too vintage visionary stuff. It s physical and tactile including a Three Stooges load of slapping. The ensuing inferno has to be extinguished manually. This is a movie we can almost completely feel. But its physicality is only part of Anderson ! s achievement. Dillon Freasier his partner and son. You might say Eli is a piece of work. For the Sundays land he wants Plainview to give to build a church. But Anderson doesn t overplay this. And if this is an allegory it s not straining to be allegorical. And it s not God s house. It s Eli s. The dais is a stage the congregation an audience. In one Eli uproariously whales on Plainview who looks ashamed more for his showboating assailant than himself. Daniel has a lot to atone for though in particular his treatment of H. But the adult curiosity in Freasier s face turns intriguingly mean. That accident and his father s monomania have severely bruised him and altered their bond. The filmmaking in this movie will do that to you leave you bruised. The resulting movie is an achievement of patient art. The novel Anderson took the movie from Sinclair s Oil is a merry go round with too many horses. Maybe Anderson thought we don t need a second McCabe and Mrs. The first one is great as it is. He also ditches the wishful editorializin! g that so thrilled Sinclair. Finding a relatively simple story to extract from Oil is in itself an act of prospecting. The moniker evoked P. Barnum and it invited you to see the circus in Anderson s emotionally volatile kaleidoscopes. Neither movie was coherent Anderson didn t seem to believe in coherence either. But he did understand cohesion. For Magnolia add to that list loud Aimee Mann music and frogs. It makes good on the film s title which may be taken from Lord Byron. The king times are fast finishing he said. There will be blood shed like water and tears like mist. But the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it but I foresee it. The movie shares some of that prophecy. But it can t find the hope. Anderson s crazy ending is right where the crazy world outside the movie theater picks up. The people s revolt against something like the tyranny of oil might have a happy ending down the road. In the meantime there is blood. Wesley Morr! is can be reached at wmorrisglobe. For more on movies go to boston. com ae movies blog . Message optional Disclaimer Boston.
Source: http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2008/01/04/striking_oil
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