血色黑金 There Will Be Blood review by Stephanie Zacharek

Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" is an austere folly, a picture so ambitious, so filled with filmmaking, that its very scale almost obscures its blankness. The source for Anderson's fifth picture is Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel "Oil!" which details how oil interests transformed the landscape of turn-of-the-century California. According to the movie's press notes, Anderson, homesick for the state in which he was born, found a copy of the novel in a London bookstore and was attracted first by its cover image and then by the story inside.

That's a lovely bit of lore, a poetic scrap of evidence of the way a book can seduce us with something as basic (and as superficial) as a cover and then draw us inside toward something deeper. Anderson -- who adapted the story himself -- may have loved "Oil!" But his love for the book doesn't burn in the picture he's made. "There Will Be Blood" is set in a suitably bleak landscape: It was shot in Marfa, Texas (the same town where "Giant" was filmed), as a stand-in for the young California, by the gifted cinematographer Robert Elswit, and his near success in turning this world of scrubby, modest bushes and blandly egotistical manmade oil derricks into something visually vital is testament to his devotion. The story -- which pits a ruthless, supposedly complex oilman named Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) against an equally megalomaniacal man of the cloth, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) -- has the bare bones of a potentially compelling story about the nature of greed and of faith, or about how single-minded any man can be in the pursuit of his goals. As always, the power of even a great story depends on how you tell it.

And the telling is where Anderson and his actors fail. I wanted to love "There Will Be Blood," and I tried to, twice: Of all the young, or youngish, filmmakers working today, Anderson isn't the one who's shown the most promise -- he's the one who's delivered on promises he never even had to make. When he was just starting out as a filmmaker, Anderson dispensed with the usual coughing preamble; the assured understatement of his first picture, "Hard Eight," was enough to make you take notice. Instead of beginning his career by making a flawed movie or two that made you murmur, "Someday, this guy could be something," he burst through the gate as a filmmaker who valued emotional directness over mere flash. His movies haven't been perfect, but for the most part, they've been perfectly open. Echoing the stammering-confident boast of Warren Beatty's John McCabe in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," the greatest film made by Anderson's spiritual predecessor, Robert Altman, Anderson said from the start, "I got poetry in me," and wasted no time proving it.

Some early reviews of "There Will Be Blood" have compared Anderson to Ford and Griffith, comparisons that are extremely flattering to a young director. But it's a bad idea to drape Anderson with the heavy mantle of that kind of greatness so early in his career, when his energy, his extraordinary rapport with actors, his willingness to take chances (even to the point of adapting long-forgotten American novels) are the strengths he should be grooving on. Anderson has already made a real epic with emotion, rather than might, on its side, in "Magnolia." An epic stands or falls on the strength of its emotional details, and by that measure, "There Will Be Blood," sprawling and grand as it tries to be, fails. "There Will Be Blood" only pretends to be elemental and raw: It's really tempered and wrought, to the point of dullness. It rings with false humility, something I never thought I'd see in an Anderson picture.

Day-Lewis' Daniel Plainview is a man whose unknowability is the point, which Anderson telegraphs in the movie's opening, a nearly wordless sequence showing us how Plainview, the future oil tycoon, began extracting his riches from the earth the hard way. The sequence is beautifully shot -- parts of it are boldly underlit so we're able to catch only glimpses of a character's movement in soft arcs of bluish light, a striking effect -- and it tells us more about the persistence and hardiness of Plainview's character than the movie's remaining two and a half hours do. We see him first as a young man, scrabbling inside a rocky hole in pursuit of a single rock speckled with silver; later, he seeks a more valuable commodity, oil, and the day he strikes it is also the day he becomes a father. With his son, H.W. (played by a marvelous child actor named Dillon Freasier, whose face offers more unvarnished expressiveness than anything else in the movie), as mascot and business partner, Plainview goes about building his empire, well by well. One day a stranger whose face has the bland flatness of a china plate steps into his office with a hot tip. The young man's name is Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), and he wants to alert Plainview, for a price, to a tract of land that he knows is rich with oil, his father's ranch.

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