No matter which way you look at it, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is tough to talk about. Without question, this is one of the year’s most magnificent motion pictures, maybe the one we will be talking about for decades to come. Yet it is also utterly reprehensible and sickeningly repugnant, the saga of a man consumed by ambition, pride and greed as venal and diseased as anything I have ever laid my eyes upon. 

Dillon Freasier and Daniel Day-Lewis in Paramount Vantage's There Will Be Blood

And yet this is a movie everyone with even a passing interest in the art of film should be standing in line and breaking down theater doors trying to see. This picture grabs hold of you by the throat and then refuses to let go, its vice-like grip growing tighter and tighter as the story’s acidic wanderings grow evermore maddening as things progress. It is a master class of spectacular filmmaking unlike anything else this year, Anderson immediately vaulting himself into the ranks of the visionary legends like Kubrick, Ford and (especially) Welles based on this.

Loosely based on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair, There Will Be Blood is a near three-hour epic chronicling the life and times of early 20^th Century American Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis). An oil prospector by trade, he’s become a master and discovering the liquid black gold and convincing communities to give him the rights to bring it out of the earth. He bills himself as a family man, he and his son H.W. (Dillon Freasier) going from town to town setting up rigs and producing thousands of barrels a day in order to further their income.

These travails lead him to the town of Little Boston where a recent earthquake and the tip of a disgruntled son have led Daniel to the biggest discovery of his career. After much cajoling he’s able to get the rights to drill all over the entire township, promising local wannabe pastor Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) he’ll build him a church and give his new congregation a $5,000 donation as soon as the first strike is made.

And so it goes from there, the Man of God versus the Man of Oil, each staring down the other with the latter’s young son caught right in the middle. But pride comes before the fall and only one man knows himself both inside and out enough to predict the ultimate outcome and it isn’t the one with the supposed direct line to the Heavenly Father. You see, Daniel doesn’t care for people all that much, doesn’t see the use in them, and even in the face of bloodcurdling tragedy and euphoric success the only constant for him remains this simple fact.

As a blow-by-blow historical document of what early oil exploration in the United States looked like it goes without saying Anderson has crafted the greatest testament to these days since George Stevens made Giant. Every ounce of sweat, blood and tears spent in the finding of the bubbly black liquid bursting just under the dusty desert surface feels hardened and true, and watching these men go through their strenuous travails to bring it up is stunningly breathtaking.

I felt their pain and their constant dread as to the dangers around them, but even more than that I felt their euphoria upon seeing all this effort come to glorious fruition. The filmmaker put me right square in the middle of their shoes, and by the time all was said and done I felt exhausted and emotionally spent to the point I felt as if I had just done all the very same work myself.

But this is not what makes Anderson’s opus so extraordinary. Working in glorious tandem with his star Day-Lewis (who is an absolute lock to take home his second Academy Award with this titanic portrayal), the director has made a (albeit fictional) biography of a man destroying himself from within the likes of which cinema has never seen before. There are comparisons, to be sure (the most obvious parallel being Charles Foster Kane), but none of them quite do Daniel Plainview justice. He is a monster, yes, but he is also human, and watching him doggedly erase all that humanity right out from inside himself is one of the more sickening perversities I quite frankly have ever witnessed.

So why do I not hate this picture when every fiber of my being tells me that I should? The answer to that question almost can’t be spoken unless you’ve watched the picture for yourself. The ambience and aura Anderson creates is undeniably enthralling, the film’s longish running time seeming to run away in the proverbial blink of an eye. More, it is an experience that screams for multiple viewings, each time watching it offering up even more exciting and enthralling intricacies to be experienced and obsessed over impossible to catch in just one sitting.

I’m not sure what else I can say. Robert Elswit’s (Michael Clayton) cinematography is the best I’ve seen this year, while astonishing work is delivered by fellow craftsmen editor Dylan Tichenor (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), production designer Jack Fisk (The New World), costumer Mark Bridges (I Heart Huckabees) and art director David Crank (Hannibal). It is a triumph of sound design and scoring (musician Jonny Greenwood creating a Kubrickian tone that’s eerie and ominous), all of it anchored by performances so brutally unforgiving and honest they literally burst right off the screen.

In the end, however, There Will Be Blood belongs to Anderson and to Anderson alone. With all the lasting import of previous pictures like Boogie Nights and Magnolia aside, this is the one we will remember the director for. His is a singular achievement of vision and tenacity impossible to dispute, and while the feelings the film ultimately generates can’t help but be ones of contaminated disgust the discussions they also promote are ones sure to last for, not only this lifetime, but probably well into the ones beyond.

Film Rating: êêêê (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  There Will Be Blood Theatrical Trailer