Among the things I disliked about the very talented Paul Thomas
Anderson’s movie There Will Be Blood, perhaps the thing I
disliked most was its use of music. I could put up with a bit of
Arvo Part to illustrate the otherworldliness of the Western
landscapes through which the film’s hero, Daniel Plainview (Daniel
Day-Lewis), had to slime his way to make his fortune in the early
days of the oil industry, and even the more constant and
anachronistic static of Radiohead is not positively offensive. But
the nobility of Brahms’s Violin Concerto as background music to a
tale otherwise unredeemed by any but the slightest hints that there
might be such a thing as human goodness or unselfishness was too
much. It only served to underscore how pointless the movie was as
anything but an opportunity for Mr. Day-Lewis to play, as he so
often does, the Great Actor and for Mr. Anderson to play Orson
Welles with this shot at a latter-day Citizen Kane, set in
the heroic days of American “capitalism” — of which, of course, it
is also a critique.
I’ve never been all that fond of Citizen Kane (1941)
itself, to tell the truth, though cineastes routinely vote it the
greatest film of all time. Like There Will Be Blood, it is
obviously the work of a film-maker of corruscating genius, but the
genius of the film-makers, great director and great actor, is the
problem with their films. Both are too self-conscious and,
ultimately, self-regarding. The artist is the hero of both (Welles
doing both the directing and the acting in his), and in
both he patronizes the life out of his principal character.
Classical tragedy was supposed to inspire, according to Aristotle,
pity and terror. These stabs at a kind of cinematic tragedy give us
the pity without the terror, or with disgust in its place. No one
looks at Charles Foster Kane or Daniel Plainview and sees himself
the way we can see ourselves in Oedipus or Hamlet
or Macbeth. Plainview, like Kane, is a would-be great man
who has been set up only in order that his creator can tear him
down — while leaving him, to be sure, a modicum of humanity with
which to certify not his but his author’s spiritual largesse.
Plainview is an oil man who, with a combination of trickery and
ruthlessness, buys up all the prime oil leases around Bakersfield,
California, at a time (1911) when the area is inhabited by poor
subsistence farmers. The farmers do not get rich off their land,
but Plainview does. And he takes as much savage satisfaction from
mastering them as he does from resisting the attempts of the big
oil companies to buy him out. “I have a competition in me,” he says
in a rare moment of self-revelation. “I want no one else to
succeed. I hate most people….There are times when I look at
people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money
that I can get away from everyone…. I see the worst in people. I
don’t need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I want to
rule and never, ever explain myself.”
Of course he is explaining himself here, to a man he believes to
be his long-lost half brother, Henry (Kevin J. O’Connor). “I’ve
built my hatreds up over the years, little by little, Henry,” he
goes on to confide: “to have you here gives me a second breath. I
can’t keep doing this on my own with these — people.” But Henry,
instead of relieving his misanthropy only confirms him in it. And,
indeed, for all we see of these “people,” he seems to be more or
less right about them, at least for all we can see. The words of
Eli Wallach’s bandito, Calvera, in The Magnificent Seven
come to mind. “If God didn’t want them sheared, he would not have
made them sheep.” Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) is almost the only one
among them who seems to know or care about what Plainview is doing
to him, and he is a religious charlatan (which in Hollywood these
days is a redundancy) who is happy to cooperate with him for his
own purposes. At one point he stages a grotesque parody of
Plainview’s conversion and repentance with no purpose but to
exaggerate the wickedness of both men.
One person who seems to inspire feelings other than anger and
contempt in Plainview is H.W. (Dillon Freasier), the orphan boy
whom he adopts as his son in order the better to sell his drilling
company to the rubes of rural California as a family-run operation.
When H.W. gets too close to a gusher and is deafened by the
explosion, we see Plainview running from the well with the child in
his arms and anguish in his face — until he realizes that his
presence is urgently required back at the well. What briefly looks
like love turns out to be only sentimentality. Likewise, at one
point he appears to prevent Eli’s little sister, Mary (Sydney
McCallister), from being beaten for not praying (those darned
Christians again!), but this is an isolated gesture and not
followed up. By the end, neither Mary nor H.W. appears to mean
anything to him.
The movie that Paul Thomas Anderson says he took as his model
was not Citizen Kane but John Huston’s Treasure of the
Sierra Madre (1948), which might get my vote as
greatest movie of all time. It makes for a fascinating comparison,
for what is missing from Blood is exactly what
Treasure could have supplied, which is the powerful sense
of ordinary human aspiration. Huston’s Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey
Bogart) was like Daniel Plainview in allowing the lust for wealth
utterly to corrupt his soul, but his two companions, played by Tim
Holt and Walter Huston, are our representatives on the spot: men
who share Dobbs’s ambition but without his terrible, all-consuming
monomania. The reversion at the end to a benign natural order from
which the Dobbsian evil has been purged strikes me as not only more
heartening but more true than the bleak war of each against all
which is the world of There Will Be Blood.
