Yet it is also directly engaged with our cinematically constructed history, specifically with films “Greed” and “Chinatown,” but also “Citizen Kane” that have dismantled the mythologies of American success and, in doing so, replaced one utopian ideal for another, namely that of the movies themselves. Anderson it feels like an act of possession. “There Will Be Blood” is very much a personal endeavor for Mr.
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Movie history weighs on every filmmaker, informs every cut, camera angle and movement. Anderson has always worn his influences openly, cribbing from Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman among others (he helped the ailing Altman with his final film, “A Prairie Home Companion”), but rarely has his movie love been as organically integrated into his work as it is here. A charismatic preacher looking to build a new church, Eli slithers into the story, one more snake in the desert. Plainview is preaching a new gospel, though one soon challenged by another salesman, Paul Sunday’s Holy Roller brother, Eli (also Mr. Day-Lewis seems to have largely borrowed from the director John Huston. (Their barren town is oddly named Little Boston.) He promises schools, roads and water, delivering his sermon with a carefully enunciated, sepulchral voice that Mr. Poor, isolated, thirsting for water (they don’t have enough even to grow wheat), the dazed inhabitants gaze at the oilman like hungry baby birds. The eruption rattles both the earth and the local population, whom Plainview soothes with promises. Not long afterward oil is gushing out of that desert. is about 10, he has become a kind of partner to his father, at once a child and a sober little man with a jacket and neatly combed hair who dutifully stands by Plainview’s side as quiet as his conscience. (Rarely has a film’s title seemed so ominous.) By the time H. that raises the stakes and gives enormous emotional force to this expansively imagined period story with its pictorial and historical sweep, its raging fires, geysers of oil and inevitable blood. Anderson makes little on-screen time for women.) But it is Plainview’s intense, needful bond with H. (Like most of the finest American directors working now, Mr. “There Will Be Blood” involves a tangle of relationships, mainly intersecting sets of fathers and sons and pairs of brothers. In one of the most quietly lovely images in a film of boisterous beauty, he gazes at the tiny, pale toddler, chucking him under the chin as they sit on a train very much alone. The brief scenes of Plainview’s first tender, awkward moments with H. (eventually played by the newcomer Dillon Freasier), the child who enters his life in 1902 after he makes his first strike and seems to have burbled from the ground like the liquid itself. It’s a century he plunges into slicked in oil, dabbed with blood and accompanied by H.
Over the next two and a half mesmerizing hours Plainview will strike oil, then strike it rich and transform a bootstrapper’s dream into a terrifying prophecy about the coming American century. This is the earth mover, the ground shaker: Plainview. Inside a deep, dark hole, a man pickaxes the hard-packed soil like a bug gnawing through dirt. And the film’s opener is a stunner spooky and strange, blanketed in shadows and nearly wordless. Anderson opens his story in 1898, closer to Norris’s novel than Sinclair’s, which begins in the years leading up to World War I. He’s more articulate and civilized than the crude, brutal title character in Frank Norris’s 1899 novel “McTeague,” and Erich von Stroheim’s masterly version of the same, “Greed.” But the two characters are brothers under the hide, coarse and animalistic, sentimental in matters of love and ruthless in matters of avarice. Anderson has mined from Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel “Oil!” There is no God but money in this oil-rich desert and his messenger is Daniel Plainview, a petroleum speculator played by a monstrous and shattering Daniel Day-Lewis. Set against the backdrop of the Southern California oil boom of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, it tells a story of greed and envy of biblical proportions reverberating with Old Testament sound and fury and New Testament evangelicalism which Mr. “There Will Be Blood,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic American nightmare, arrives belching fire and brimstone and damnation to Hell.