PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON seems to be fond of plagues in the films that he directs. There Will Be Blood (Cert. 12A) (loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!) takes its title from Exodus 7. In consequence of Egypt’s oppression, its elemental life force, the River Nile, is turned into blood. Moses’s prophetic imagination has offered Pharoah a radical alternative to his exploitative ways: why not let my people go? His plea is not heeded.
Anderson’s Magnolia concludes with a hail of frogs — a judgement on those who fail to follow the paths of redemption. Other films of his deal with epidemics — in Boogie Nights, the porn industry. But do his morality tales have to take so long? Even the shortest of the above films runs for more than two-and-a-half hours.
Nevertheless, There Will Be Blood is a film of biblical stature. In a variation on the Eden story, hell is unleashed when something precious is unearthed and taken from God’s creation. The year is 1898. In a 20-minute sequence with no dialogue, we witness Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis in a BAFTA-winning performance) striking silver in the wilds of California. He redirects his new-found revenue towards oil, increasingly in demand with the advent of motor cars, and becomes extremely rich.
So far, so American. The trouble is that he is dead behind the eyes. Plainview hates people and desires wealth as a means of avoiding them. He is not a man gaining the whole world and losing his soul: rather, we see no evidence that he ever had one. Indeed, Anderson offers few insights into his characters’ inner lives. The narrative at times is unclear and ambiguous, too; so we must join up many of the dots for ourselves.
When one of Plainview’s workers is killed, he takes in the son, HW (Dillon Freasier), but only in order to pose as a family man while conning ordinary folks out of their oil-rich smallholdings. He meets his match in Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a brimstone preacher who extracts a large donation to his church for drilling on his family’s land.
Sunday (probably based on Billy Sunday, a flamboyant evangelist of the same era) is as spiritually flawed as Plainview. Both want power and money. Each has opportunities of redemption: for Plainview, in the shape of a girl he rescues from her father’s thrashings; or his long-term association with HW. But, Midas-like, if Plainview cannot turn what he touches into gold, he is not interested. As the psalmist says, they that make such things into idols become like them.
Eli misuses both Plainview’s money and his own congregation. Plainview refuses Eli’s offer to bless his oil well; but Eli may be just as venal in suggesting a blessing on something that exploits the land and brings misery to those who live there. Later, when it suits both men, Plainview postures as a convert in exchange for Eli’s land, in order to run a pipeline across it.
There Will Be Blood is the unacceptable face of American capitalism — a Grapes of Wrath for our time. Not everyone gets their come-uppance, but all are infected by the greed and corruption around them.
Anderson endorses the Mosaic quest to free people from their enslavement. Daniel Plainview epitomises what the United States has become, a far cry from its native American origins, out of which comes the Cree prophecy: it will only be when the last river has been poisoned that people will realise they cannot eat money.
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