Black Gold & A Stroke of Genius
By Edmund Eugene Mullins
Day-Lewis and Dillion Freasier in There Will Be Blood, above.
Paul Thomas Anderson is back, and to quote R. Lee Ermey’s bellicose drill instructor, he’s been “reborn hard.” It took the crucible of a shitty movie (Punch-Drunk Love) and a five-year hiatus to do it, but There Will Be Blood finds the director radically matured and-who saw this coming?-possessed of an entirely new aesthetic. The Altman-derivative, dialogue-loving pop enthusiast behind Boogie Nights and Magnolia has gone period piece, shedding the bulk of his stylistic skin in the process, and crafting a film that strives to be as austere as his previous works were overcooked.
The setting is the Southern California desert at the turn of the century, where prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) intends to strike it rich digging for oil. Murderously ambitious, he single-handedly digs the hole for his first derrick. “I have a competition in me,” he confesses. “I want no one else to succeed.” Success comes when he buys a small goat farm. There are gushers and expanding fortunes, but not without obstacles; Plainview runs afoul of various opportunists, a meddlesome evangelical, and, as the score insistently reminds us, the very land itself.
Based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, Anderson’s script discards much of that book’s narrative and nearly all of its ideological freight (viz.-pro-socialist agitprop), leaving only a hard-edged, rags-to-riches fable. Gone are the director’s groovy sensibilities, gaudy mise-en-scène, and ensemble casts. There Will Be Blood is altogether un-hip and formally lean, and its hero very much a man alone. At heart, it’s an extended character study, albeit of a nearly inscrutable individual.
What we know for sure of Plainview is that he’s a self-destructive Aguirre, afflicted with that peculiarly American rapacity where no amount of hardship will deter him, nor any amount of money satisfy. Day-Lewis imbues the role with a messianic zeal that his scenes can barely contain. His eyes perpetually smolder with determination, and each line is uttered with seething rage. At what, it’s not easy to say. But Day-Lewis’s performance is the kind that—like his Bill the Butcher role in Gangs of New York—nearly supercedes the film itself.
Not that There Will Be Blood isn’t masterfully executed. Throughout, Anderson shows a remarkable restraint given his usual pyrotechnic style. A “gee-whiz!” showman in love with whip-pans, steadi-cams, and other glamour mechanisms, here Anderson calms down, his gaze more assured, his pace more deliberate. He even summons the courage to let extended scenes play out without dialogue, although rarely without the help of the miraculous score by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood.
Ultimately, There Will Be Blood may not be Anderson’s masterpiece—it runs too long and suffers occasional unevenness—but it does mark his graduation from young lion status, proving him a director with both a gift for reinvention and a serious competition in him.
If Anderson is moving away from formal stunts, painter-turned-director Julian Schnabel is embracing them wholeheartedly in his latest effort, and to sublime effect. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells the true story of high-flying Elle magazine editor, Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), who at 43 is felled by a stroke. Completely paralyzed with the exception of his left eye, Bauby’s condition transports him from disbelief, to anger, to a kind of wondrous enlightenment. Drawing on uncanny reserves of determination, he learns to communicate exclusively with his eye, and painstakingly dictates the memoir upon which the film is based.
What makes The Diving Bell and the Butterfly so extraordinary is the way Schnabel renders his subject’s interiority. Much of the picture is shot from a first-person point of view, which viscerally re-creates the claustrophobia of Bauby’s physical confinement. But the film is not a four-walled nightmare. On the contrary, it frequently slips into long, diary-like passages-surfeited with thoughts, dreams, and provocative memories-that beautifully underscore the expansive, playful freedom of Bauby’s inner life. It is here that Schnabel’s artistry is most admirably on display. His instinct for finding just the right imagery, be it a collapsing glacier or the wistful smile of an ex-lover, is sufficiently spot-on to make one wish that all directors were painters first.
