Few cinematic epics are as unflinchingly grim and forthright in their vision of the Western world as P.T. Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood”. Fewer still can imbue such a picture with fresh satirical jabs. Alan Ball nailed it with American Beauty. Tarantino pastiched his way through the pulp of 70’s Pop Culture. Anderson joins this burgeoning league of artists who snarkily question, often through humour as dark as their subjects, the foundations of the American Empire. Described by many as a relentless critique of the “idea of America”, “There Will Be Blood” charts the serendipitous but nonetheless inevitable collision course of the two strongest cultural currents in the West: Capitalism and Religion.
Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) is a fledgling, albeit immensely dedicated, oilman of the Rockefeller era. During the first few minutes, blood, sweat and oil dance on a face taut with stoicism. His eyes burn sheer will as he drags his freshly broken frame miles across the wilderness. This is an image of America that has often been glossed over, especially in the Colonially-incubated East; an image of heated rock and icy gales and nightmarish landscapes, where the only future lay in the rivers of black gold flowing underneath. Later on in the film, Daniel’s moral compass shifts and goes places, but these impossible initial hurdles and his struggles in overcoming them and building a better world still echo, however faintly, until the end.
As Daniel assembles a small crew to work on the extraction of oil, the tinkering of crude machinery - a tenet that will dominate the visual language of the rest of the film - makes an ominous entrance. When one of his workers meets with a fatal accident - the first in a series of casualties of an empire in the making - Daniel adopts his son in what appears to be an act of fraternal kindness. Daniel’s hard work soon pays off, and we watch as an American dream - one of the very first ones - finds its wings. Pieces of lands are bought off and drilled into and, one acre at a time, the industrial revolution spreads like wildfire into God’s blessed country. The small town landowners are promised all the perks of an investment in oil: health care, education, equal rights. Plainview’s demeanor, however, has all the signs of a shrewd, ulterior motive. “Can everything here be got?”, Plainview smugly asks a real estate agent, not much later in the film.
Plainview, who goes around Utah pitching leases for land when he’s not drilling for oil, crosses paths with Paul Sunday, a staunch Christian and a self-proclaimed vehicle of God. Sunday proposes a symbiotic partnership that, quite predictably, goes awry. The violent dynamic that ensues forms the heart of the film. Sparks fly; consumerism clashes with social conventions and science has a stand-off with belief. As the two characters duel it out with each other, bashing long-held values and ideals, all that is left standing is the ugly head of opportunism. The stench of megalomania is pungent. How could there not be blood?
Not a lot of films released today fully appreciate the significance of “Prosody” in their art. Form and story often lie in disparate fragments. Seldom does a fully interwoven whole of style and substance like “TWBB” come along. On top of all its cultural and historical complexity, Anderson has every film department firing on all fours. The most apparent of these elements is Robert Elswit’s Oscar - Winning cinematography. Wide shots of endless, sweeping landscapes interspersed with close-ups haggard and lean. Bright, sunny skies bearing down on hard shadows and barren wastelands. In almost all of their squabbles, Plainview and Sunday share a single frame, driving home the utter incompatibility of their individual philosophies. The camera is almost never static, always clubbed to slow tracks or dollies, and the resulting momentum is palpably forceful. It’s a scenic picture that Elswit paints with a palette of mildly saturated hues, with just the right smattering of crimson.
Apart from the obligatory accuracy in production design that would accompany a historical piece of such scale and significance, the sound work is another area where Anderson strikes gold. The first human sound in the film is the piercing cry of a soon-to-be orphaned baby. It’s a sound that is soon lost in a web of other sonic intrusions, of clanking metal, rhythmic drilling, and all the cacophonia that go together with the slow advent of urbanization. It is a soundscape that sits on the fence between urban dystopia and rustic idyll, one that toes the fringes of familiarity well enough to be unsettling. As with the camera, the sound holds Plainview’s son H.W. in contempt. Throughout the film, his voice is silenced in more than one way. In the widely lauded Oil Derrick explosion scene, a distraught H.W. complains to his father about his sudden deafness. “I can’t hear my voice”, he tells a shockingly indifferent Plainview, and we are left to wonder if he was talking in literal terms. Seeping in and out from in between the story and the characters are the discordant orchestral compositions by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. The tense unnerving score, a droning monotone that would feel right at home in a Shyamalan thriller, drenches the movie in the ominous dawn of the twentieth century.
Anderson’s film stands as an achievement in skill, both theatrical and technical; its merits, however, exceed the usual benchmarks of a well-made history piece and go on to tap into the cultural tenets of the era that have survived over the decades. Bigotry, tribalism, unabashed misogyny (at one point, Plainview publicly christens Sunday’s kid sister “The Daughter of the Mountains”, just to offend the Church’s patriarchal sensibilities), all issues that movies today grapple with, but never quite as shrewdly as in “Blood”. It’s also a testament to great directorial skill that a film of such an allegorical nature still retains, right till the end, a dedication to crafting a tapestry of original, quirky, wicked characters that feel as scary and hilarious as the corporate behemoths of today.
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