February 15, 2008...6:55 pm
There Will Be Blood And Other Bits
DUE WARNING: THE FOLLOWING MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF SPOILERS. IF READING PERSISTS, PLEASE SEE YOUR DOCTOR.
Daniel Plainview, another intense Daniel Day-Lewis original, is a self-made man. Around the turn of the 19th Century into the 20th he makes his fortune as a prospector first in gold, then in oil. He has taken in an orphaned boy and raises him as his own son. He is a hard man, but on the whole a decent one. All this changes - or perhaps is revealed never to have been the case - when young Paul Sunday is paid to introduce Daniel to his hometown in California, where an earthquake has brought to light an oil well that could make Plainview rich beyond his wildest dreams. But the town is lorded over by charismatic young preacher Eli Sunday, Paul’s twin brother, whose own ambitions increasingly find him at odds with Daniel. The board is set, the stakes quickly raise, and before all is said and done there will, as the title promises, be blood.
So I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest last night. I saw it because of the reviews, because of Daniel Day-Lewis, because it is a subversive Valentine’s Day choice of activity, and because it is considered a forerunner in the Oscar race, which otherwise, because of my writing, I confess I haven’t really been following lately. But I also saw it because it features Paul Dano as a young priest, prophet and faith healer. This is obviously relevant to my own work. He’s quite a hysterical character, Eli Sunday, and I certainly have no intention of mirroring him in Nicholas, my shepherd boy prophet, but the scenes in which he holds forth and chases out demons has inspired a sequence in The Children’s Crusade in which Nicholas, far gone by this point, violently tries to exorcise the supposed demon in his friend Stephen, whose only fault, of course, has been to stir the demon in Nicholas himself.
Other than that, I may have tried to see more or different things in the film than were in fact there. For example, I was convinced for a while that Paul and Eli were really one schizophrenic character - capitalism and fundamentalism, the twin devils on Daniel’s shoulders. This would give an interesting spin to Daniel’s words in the final scene that “Paul was the true prophet”, as if to imply that what he, Daniel, stood for had ultimately won over Eli’s evangelical ambitions. When Eli appeared in that final scene not a day older than his sixteen years younger self, I was certain for a time that Daniel had died and that he was, for whatever reason, stuck in a limbo shaped like a bowling alley, being taunted by some spirit or inner part of himself who had taken the shape of the man he most hated in life. And finally, the presence of Ciaran Hinds in the role of Daniel’s colleague Fletcher made me assume, on the basis of his star power, that he’d be of greater importance than the handful of scenes he ended up being in.
But in the end the film is really (just) a character study of a man who by his own admission looks at people and sees nothing worth liking - and a brutally fascinating one at that.
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