There Will Be Blood
2-Disc Collector’s Edition
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Dillon Freasier, Paul Dano, Kevin J. O’Connor
Paramount Home Video
Release Date: April 8, 2008
Rated R

The arrival of a new screener in the mail here at the Clemens compound is usually an instance of great wariness. It is either a low-budget horror movie that’s painful to sit through, or some middle of the road theatrical feature that needs all the help it can get now that it’s available on Netflix.

Oh sweet almighty Christ, is today’s movie an exception. I’ve gotten a lot of movies in the mail, some good, some bad, some that are so awful they shouldn’t be screened near an open flame. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood is the only one that will be remembered after all of us are dead and gone. That I got my grubby, heathen hands on it a week and a half before the rest of the world was enough to make me cackle like a mad scientist.

Freed from the sound and fury of a theater setting, one can fully burrow into There Will Be Blood on the level of the motivation and consciousness of the characters, particularly Daniel Day-Lewis‘ ego-driven Daniel Plainview. I think it’s safe to say that watching this film on DVD is almost a completely different experience from watching it in a darkened auditorium. The latter is like bearing witness to tragedy on an epic scale. The former is like being locked in a closet with a wild animal.

In what could be described as Giant in the ninth ring of Hell, Plainview, a simple silver miner in turn of the century Southern California, strikes oil. He makes enough money to send himself and his son and partner (Dillon Freasier) across California to inquire into new property to start drilling. He comes into contact with Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) who lives in the town of Little Boston and wishes to sell Plainview the property. When Plainview goes to Little Boston, he comes into contact with Paul’s twin brother Eli, who runs a small church and wishes donations be made to his congregation and that he could bless the wells. Plainview doesn’t allow this, and tragedy befalls him.

The rivalry between Paul and Daniel takes up the majority of There Will Be Blood, with Paul’s religious rapture in one corner and Plainview’s monstrous self-interest in the other. It’s not that Plainview is simply an atheist. Rather, the concept of a force in the universe greater than himself is wholly alien and completely unwelcome.

But what became just a tad more obvious in this home video viewing is the competition between Eli and Plainview in the department of being The Man. Here in Eli Sunday, we have a simple preacher who, more than the want of Heaven, wants to be anything other than “simple.” Both his sermons and his angry private missives contain more force and righteousness than his scrawny body can contain. At the height of fury, Eli’s voice cracks into girlish screaming. He wishes to be a leader of men and the one to guide his town to the sweet hereafter, but it is a mission he wasn’t built for. All the heart, but none of the charisma. A zealot in the body of an also-ran.

The mirror opposite, on the other hand, is Plainview. This town depends on him and his business simply to exist. He IS a leader. He DOES have the charisma. The problem therein is his deep-seeded and all consuming misanthropy and complete disdain for anyone else. “I have a competition in me,” he tells his brother Henry (Kevin J. O’Connor) one night. “I want no one else to succeed.” His entire life is devoted not to living in wealth, but painstakingly showing EVERYONE ELSE that he lives in wealth. It is telling that, with all the money he has at his disposal, Plainview opts to sleep on the floor. This is what makes There Will Be Blood the most grievous kind of tragedy. Plainview lives in complete inner-squalor, and it was all his idea. There is no room in his thinly veiled reptilian brain for repentance.

The film-long perpetual showdown between Eli and Plainview results in agony and pain, but make no mistake. These two were made for each other.

This is set in the elaborate and desolate stage in which the great Paul Thomas Anderson lays out for us. There is something about this film that compelled everyone involved in it to career-best work. The entirety of the cast and crew was possessed by something to make There Will Be Blood one of the greatest films ever made. Day-Lewis earned his Oscar, as did cinematographer Robert Elswit. He, along with production designer Jack Fisk and costume designer Mark Bridges make every frame of the film worthy of being blown up and put on your wall. And special consideration should go to the film’s scorer (and Radiohead guitarist) Johnny Greenwood, whose work lends the film a creepy, Kubrickian propulsion.

There is so much metaphor and symbolism in There Will Be Blood to send the brain of film geeks of every stripe into overdrive for years. Maybe even decades. From the pot-smelling dorm room denizen with the Blue Velvet one-sheet on his wall, to the tweedy screenwriting professor. We will hear dueling interpretations of Anderson’s masterpiece for as long as the subject of conversation is the American Motion Picture. It stands as the Sphinx, both massive and mysterious. Beautiful and elusive. Its surface is indecipherable.

And in the tradition of the best films, it is up to us to figure it all out.

-FEATURES “˜N’ SHIT-

The second disc of the set has roughly an hour of special features, among them”¦

-A slideshow of research photographs compared to the film. This leads me to believe that Anderson based the film less on Upton Sinclair‘s novel Oil! and more on how carried away he got preparing for the film.

-Two deleted scenes, one of which features the oil-drilling crew trying to get a piece of equipment out of the well, and the other of Plainview’s son giving him a haircut. These just spell out in plain English some of the core themes of the film and were better left on the cutting room floor.

-Something called “Dailies Gone Wild,” where Day-Lewis cracks up during a take. Well THIS is certainly a development. I though he just WOKE UP all method-y and morose.

-An silent industrial short from 1923 called The Story of Petroleum. On its own, it’s an interesting little aside. But with some new work by Johnny Greenwood, the ins and outs of oil-drilling never was so creepy.

**** out of 4