Touch of Evil

Plainview is, like the movie that contains him, profoundly eccentric and very interesting. And because of how singular a character he is, Plainview does not seem to be a symbol of anything. He is not the personification of capitalism run amok, or the oil business, or America in the 20th century. For that reason alone, There Will Be Blood rises above the model of socialist agitation provided by Upton Sinclair, who wrote the novel on which it is loosely based.

But as conceived by writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, and acted to a fare-thee-well by Day-Lewis, Plainview doesn’t symbolize anything other than the human soul’s tragic capacity to shrivel away. The spellbinding first 15 minutes of the movie feature only a few words of spoken dialogue, as Anderson works with riveting force to establish Plainview’s great personal strength and iron determination. We begin with him literally in a hole 50 feet deep, a mine he has dug with his own hands. He effortlessly swings a pickaxe and scratches at the mine walls for gold.

He climbs out, drinks coffee, sets a dynamite charge, loses his footing, and tumbles into his own hole, shattering a leg. Seizing a rock of gold, he manages to hoist himself out of the mine and onto his back on a rocky mountainside. Whereupon the 38-year-old Anderson, in a single moment proving himself the finest director of his generation, pulls the camera back to show Plainview’s isolation. He is alone, in the middle of nowhere. He will have to drag himself on his back for miles and miles on jagged rock to save his own life and secure his fortune.

Here and throughout, as he did in his Oscar-winning turn as a quadriplegic in My Left Foot and an 18th-century woodsman in The Last of the Mohicans, Daniel Day-Lewis demonstrates a physical commitment to performance that makes American method actors look like dilettantes and hacks.

As Plainview journeys through life, he shows signs of a nobility of spirit, in particular by taking in a child left orphaned and raising him with great kindness as his own. He also gives contradictory indications of being a bamboozling hustler, talking poverty-stricken Californians out of their share of the oil fortunes he is shrewd enough to see on their lands. He is a strange and unfathomable person, defiantly uncategorizable. The problem is that the movie probably would have benefited from a conscious and obvious effort on Anderson’s part to turn Plainview into a symbolic representation of America at its worst. Such a decision would have been artistically questionable and politically noxious. But it would have made watching There Will Be Blood a more satisfying experience because it would have given the movie a broader and more mythic scope.

Instead, Anderson and Day-Lewis force us into an uncomfortably intimate embrace with Plainview, and Plainview alone, for two hours and 38 minutes, and the embrace becomes suffocating. There are, I believe, only two scenes in which Lewis does not appear, and there are only three other characters in the movie who have even minimally defined personalities.

One of them is his antagonist, a suspect Pentecostal preacher named Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) with whom he finds himself unwillingly intertwined for years. But there isn’t much in the way of contest between them. Plainview is a tower of a man while Sunday is a twitchy mouse, and too odd to be of much interest. Their final confrontation, in the movie’s controversial coda, is as lopsided as a Harlem Globetrotters showdown with the Washington Generals.

Many critics enthusiastic about There Will Be Blood are highly critical of this final scene, and think the film would have been improved by its elimination. But the movie charts a course for Daniel Plainview, one that requires him to manifest the satanic evil on display at its conclusion. To do otherwise would be to betray the film’s own moral logic. Plainview sacrifices all the goodness that was in him, and the movie’s audience must sacrifice any hope of him finding redemption.

I can’t remember a movie about which I’ve felt quite so divided. I write this a week after having seen it, and I still don’t know whether There Will Be Blood should be hailed as a landmark accomplishment, or condemned as an ultimately pointless exercise. And I can’t decide whether Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance is among the greatest ever committed to film, or a flagrant piece of hammery.

There Will Be Blood offers a remarkable study of degeneration, but to what end? There are moments nearly as painful as a root canal, but at least at the conclusion of a root canal one has been improved by the experience. Are we improved in any way by There Will Be Blood, this Calvinist sermon of a film?

John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.