"There Will Be Blood": My Favorite Movie of 2007

"There Will Be Blood" works. To say that is high praise, I think, given that I can't think of any Thomas Paul Anderson movie up until this one that I liked. "Punch Drunk Love" tried to survive on quirkiness, but the concept grew tired after twenty minutes. I haven't been able to finish "Magnolia." But "There Will Be Blood" is an epic Californian tragedy which will outlive these movies, and, hopefully, the movies of his mentor, Robert Altman.

"Blood" is a Californian picture, but it is a different California from the California of, say, "Sunset Boulevard". This is not the California that Wallace Stegner meant when he said that the golden state was like the rest of America, only more so. This is a California which in which deprivation is the only thing ravaging the landscape and the only thing that needs to. The only evidence that anything had been there before the Midwestern looking settlers who inhabit its desolate edifices is the oil that comes seeping from the ground, lifeless and black.

It is hard to imagine anybody looking on this landscape and seeing opportunity. But, then again, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis in his best role to date) is not anybody and no sooner has an inhabitant of a barren township called Little Boston told him that oil comes up from the ground, than he has packed his belongings, company and adopted son and established himself as a community leader.

This would hardly seem irregular or unnatural, but I do not recall having a feeling through the movie that could be described as either natural or regular. There is something in the seeping of the oil, the nodding of the grasshopper pump, the inanimate pools of black gold waiting to be shipped to their final resting place, that endues the movie with a sense of horror. The audience always knows something is going to happen--an earthquake, a falling object--but they never know what.

Daniel Day-Lewis matches the movie's sense of creepiness almost perfectly. His dialogue rolls off the tongue with a fullness and eloquence that is not seen too often anymore and, while we are not seduced by him, we get a sense of why his those who deal with him may be. He is reckless, insensitive and alcoholic, but communicates the sense that, beneath there exterior is a tortured and confused human being. An idea that is both touching and frightening.

The film covers several decades, but, unlike Mr. Anderson's best known earlier work, "Magnolia," this movie has the advantage of focusing on one central character. This does not mean that the other characters are not interesting. Plainview's main antagonist, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) does a good turn as a charlatan Pentecostal minister; the type who would assert that vengeance belongs to God and that he is God's vengeance. In a movie year which has produced many memorable villains, Dano's Sunday will have to take his place alongside some of the worst produced by Flannery O'Connor. The final confrontation between him and Plainview is one of the best character interactions in recent memory.

But it is Mr. Day-Lewis whose performance is the most memorable. I can hardly think of a single materialist who seemed so spirited and it is he, as well as Mr. Anderson, who makes "Blood" the best movie of 2007.