Review: There Will Be Blood

Studio City-born director Paul Thomas Anderson has never made a movie that wasn't about California, and in his first few features he showed us views of the state that were familiar, albeit with his own creative twists. The Seventies glow of Boogie Nights and the suburban desolation of Punch-Drunk Love, for example, were unmistakably rooted in Los Angeles.

With his latest and most mature film, There Will Be Blood, Anderson goes a short distance north and about a century back to deliver a vision of California that's no less true but not nearly as well known. Inspired by Upton Sinclair's novel, Oil! (the story apparently deviates widely from the book) Blood follows an independent oilman as he battles the industry's barons and his own demons.

This is California between the 1890s and the 1920s, before it underwent the softening effects of mass migration and postwar suburbanization. There's nature and open space everywhere, but greed and a crude form of civilization are running rampant over it. Freewheeling capitalism and fundamentalist religion were in fact prominent in California before modern corporatism and, later, New Left politics and New Age spirituality became hallmarks of the state. Anderson conveys the raw texture of that time and place with a vigorous directorial style, and Jonny Greenwood's angular score forms a perfect harmony to that vision.

But the heart of the film is Daniel Day-Lewis as the oilman, Daniel Plainview. He appears in nearly every scene of the film, from his early days drilling wells with a few employees to his wealth and success at the end. As in Gangs of New York, Day-Lewis plays a cruel, towering figure who would force his will on the world. But Scorsese let himself be consumed by the violence and mythology of his story, whereas Anderson does a better job of letting Day-Lewis's nuanced acting shine through.

Day-Lewis plays Plainview as simultaneously larger than life and needy, both masterful and insecure. The accent he uses is vaguely English, like that of Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane. It's distracting on a character in California who supposedly grew up in Michigan, but like many things in Blood -- and famously, in California -- it's just made up. Like Kane, Plainview is a man essentially out of place everywhere who stakes his claim over as big a world as he can create. But as much as Orson Welles deserves credit for creating Kane, Day-Lewis's performance in this California tycoon story is miles ahead of the radio pioneer's stage-acting.

Day-Lewis doesn't carry the film entirely by himself. Paul Dano's performance as an evangelist practically splits the character at its seams, and Kevin J. O'Connor is wonderfully understated as a mysterious visitor who comes into Plainview's life. The surprise of the film, however, is Dillon Freasier as Plainview's son. Even as a character in his early teens, sitting solemnly at his father's side, he exudes a mysterious intelligence.

Be forewarned that this is an almost all-male movie, and an occasionally violent one. But it's not a macho film or in love with its protagonist. Blood is a compelling study of a fascinating man, and not one conducted at a safe distance. Day-Lewis and Anderson throw us right into the muck, and by the end, we recognize it.