There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas Anderson continues to be best known for his two hit films from the ’90s, Magnolia and Boogie Nights, though the sophisticated There Will Be Blood demonstrates just how far he’s come as an artist since then. There Will Be Blood, in practice if not in spirit, is most like his last film, Punch Drunk Love: both are very much aware of what young, smart American cinema needs to be doing right now. Anderson builds on precedent, combining Old Hollywood craftsmanship, which has fallen by the wayside since the 1980s, with the innovations of the Hollywood Renaissance of the 1970s. And he does it, for the most part, without excessive narcissism or showiness. A rarity among his contemporaries, Anderson is actually able to use his knowledge and love of film history to make his own work better.

There is no finer illustration of this than the opening of There Will Be Blood—an intense, dialogue-free sequence that seems simultaneously fresh and timeless. Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) searches doggedly for silver, risking his life with a wanton compulsion, and eventually unearths oil. The drawn-out silences and positioning of the camera in the pit alongside Plainview convey the grunting, merciless determination that will come to define his character. Based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, There Will Be Blood is indeed all about things that burble up; as Plainview builds his empire, his indomitable personality finds its match in that of young fundamentalist preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), and the two alternate in bombastic, frightening expressions of triumph and disillusion. The title is both a promise and an inevitability, a mark of Plainview’s rapacious capitalism and of Sunday’s apocalyptic proselytizing.

There Will Be Blood is an arrant allegory for America—there was perhaps no better political film in all of 2007—though one hardly needs to feel ideologically attached to it to enjoy it. This is epic filmmaking at its strongest; at 158 minutes its sprawling length is, for the most part, justifiable, and there is certainly no lagging in Day-Lewis’s workmanlike performance, quite possibly the best of his career. Both challenging and jaw-droppingly entertaining, There Will Be Blood is, quite simply, impossible to ignore. SEE IT NOW

There Will Be Blood is now playing at the Varsity (55 Bloor St. W.).