Churning out a masterpiece

Paul Thomas Anderson's strange and potent epic about oil and greed pushes at the boundaries of cinema, says Peter Bradshaw

THIS film has overshot the runway of movie modernity with something thrillingly, dangerously new. That title is subtler than you think.

Blood only makes its appearance in the very last, operatic scene. Before that, the wounds are internal, or covered by another liquid, gushing from the ground as from a slashed artery.

The leading character is often to be seen darkly smothered in it, like a voodoo priest after a spectacular sacrifice. It is oil: the dwindling lifeblood of our 21st-century prosperity.

With its lowering, psychotic atmosphere and its Bunyanesque surnames, There Will Be Blood is so potent and so strange that it almost seems to have been delivered here from another planet.

I can only describe it as an epic portrait, running from the beginning of the 20th century to the great crash of 1929.

The movie speaks of oil's savage, entrepreneurial pre-history; in one haunted man, it shows our dysfunctional relationship with capital and natural resources, and even hints at a grim future in which our addiction to oil can no longer be fed.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a pioneer silver-miner who chances upon oil in 1898, a discovery he greets with a brief, leonine grin - one of the very few times he smiles. Shrewdly, ruthlessly, Plainview parlays that initial stroke of good luck into a gigantic fortune, driven by pride and misanthropic contempt for everyone and everything around him.

But Plainview has one vulnerability: he has an adopted son, named HW (Dillon Freasier), whom he loves and yet exploits. And he has an enemy: a smooth and sanctimonious young preacher, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), whose family ranch Plainview has had to buy to get at the oceans of oil underground.

The opening scenes of There Will Be Blood are really extraordinary. Jonny Greenwood's atonal orchestral score is cranked up to 11, like the rest of Anderson's film, and against its ominous clamour, you see the stark mountainous landscape where Plainview is working underground, fanatically, unceasingly, hacking away with his pickaxe.

I can only compare this wordless sequence to the Dawn of Man scene at the beginning of Stanley Kubrick's 2001, in which the apes discover that they can use their opposable thumbs to grip tools, and so bash the bone into the air, which becomes the spaceship.

Plainview's underground toil is like this: barbaric, almost inhuman. This was the dirty work that created our leisured modern age. Crafted and stylised, Day-Lewis' performance for me amounts to a sensual pleasure: like Olivier, he has apparently found the character by first hitting on externals, notably the voice, itself a startling invention.

It is a drawl, oddly patrician in its pedantic intonations and emphases, with a Scots-Irish-American sound, perhaps inspired by John Huston.

When Day-Lewis gives his first speech, a quiet, faintly impatient peroration to a crowd of smallholders on why they should trust him as a real "oil man", it is mesmeric for no reason other than the actor's natural charismatic presence.

Day-Lewis' virtuoso displays of technique, occasionally denounced as hamminess, are for me all the more superbly enjoyable for being so rare in an age of naturalism. He has also found a remarkable walk: a slow purposeful scuttle, bow-legged. Maybe it's because of a terrible fall we saw in the first reel - or perhaps, well, it's just a great actor's walk.

This movie is epic, but not in the usual manner. It is austere; Day-Lewis' Plainview is in almost every shot, and often in close-up. A more conventional director would have tried a broadening out, establishing a context both for Plainview's career and the oil rush generally, with huge crowds, CGI boom-towns and sequences in which Plainview would be attended by dozens of salaryman flunkies, the better to show his remarkable elevation.

In another sort of film, there might be some rich confectionery in the mix: some funny moments, maybe. Not here. Lonely, miserable, fuelled by resentment and hate, Plainview is seen mostly in the desert, appropriately, with only a few associates or alone.

Anderson's strangest touch is to have Eli Sunday and his more Mammon-worshipping brother Paul (the brother who alerts Plainview to the family's oil in the first place) played by the same actor, Paul Dano.

It is a startling anti-realistic contrivance that is the director's one authorial provocation: it actually creates a baffling moment of confusion at the beginning of the film.

Like a wilful artist, Anderson splodges his own canvas with this unreality, perhaps paradoxically to demonstrate his own mastery, and perhaps to prevent being upstaged by his leading man.

There Will Be Blood has even been compared to Citizen Kane, and to this, I can only say that there is one moment when, in front of nervously cheering underlings, Plainview symbolically drives a claim-stake into a map: and that's comparable to Orsen Welles' sycophantic newsmen singing their special song about "good old Charlie Kane".

But Plainview is simply too cantankerous, and too mad, to have anything like the breezy cordiality of Kane. He gives stiff little speeches to common folk, but he has no talent for the corporate-theatrical, snake-oil-salesman side of capitalism; that is the preserve of his great enemy, Eli, whom he finally confronts, living like a hermit in his vast, mouldering Tudor-style manor house.

It is here that the lights have grown dim, and Plainview is more utterly alone than ever in his twilit fastness, boasting of how he can rapaciously consume everyone else's oil, like sucking up a milkshake. It is a post-apocalyptic scenario, and I couldn't help seeing in it our own exhausted future without oil.

This is a dark, uncompromising film, thrillingly original and distinctive, with a visionary passion. It is a movie against which all directors, and all moviegoers, will want to measure themselves.

Paul Thomas Anderson is doing something new with cinema, and you can hardly ask for more than that.