'There Will Be Blood' fails to strike it rich

(C-) More oil and sweat than passion and ideas course through There Will Be Blood, a film about the California petroleum boom of the early 20th century that is as anemic as it is ambitious. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has crafted a rise-and-fall film of the least imaginative kind. From 1898 through the Roaring '20s, the central character, Daniel Plainview, achieves towering financial success. Morally he scrapes the bottom of the barrel.

With Daniel Day-Lewis as this monomaniacal oil baron, the central character, who is also nearly the only character, should have some heft. But Day-Lewis gives a go-for-broke performance that ends up just plain broke. His interpretation of a man who mistrusts everything except the work of his own hands may be "bold and honest," "full of integrity" and all the other phrases that get trotted out reflexively for this often-brilliant actor.

But it's also unrevealing. By the second hour of nearly three, he's exhausted his actor's toolkit (there's nothing engaging enough to suggest a bag of tricks). All that's left for him to do is ramp up Plainview's misanthropy to ludicrous peaks of paranoia. This movie isn't a lament for rapacious capitalism; the representatives of Standard Oil see how crazy Plainview is. ("It makes Standard Oil look sympathetic," said one movie-director friend, aghast.) There Will Be Blood is about a man who flees the human race and an actor who takes leave from acting.

You tire of the dead-eyed glare and grass-roots-lordly accent he patterned after John Huston's acting in films like Chinatown, because Day-Lewis is Huston purged of psychology and poetry. Huston's eyes were enigmatic, not maniacal or void of feeling, like Day-Lewis', and his voice resonated with experience. Day-Lewis offers a clenched version of Huston that fits this airless movie. It starts out as a tapestry of the pioneer oil business and becomes a long study of a puny character.

Writer-director Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is Anderson's favorite movie, and it looms over There Will Be Blood as much as the source novel, Upton Sinclair's Oil. But Huston was a great storyteller: He knew how to streak a fable about greed with vivid incidents and humor. These didn't merely vary his narrative or make it more "entertaining" but also connected extreme behavior to life as most of us know it.

Anderson is at his most Huston-like when he presents the nuts and bolts of Plainview's operation. The drilling and negotiating sequences are equally engrossing. Plainview tells owners of oil-rich land that he's an "oil man," not a "speculator," and if they sell him the oil rights to their property they can cut out the middleman. He turns plain speaking into a sales pitch, but not enough of one to carry the movie.

Cinematographer Robert Elswit and production designer Jack Fisk deliver the best performances. They lower us into the tenebrous mine shafts with Plainview, detailing his labor without sweetening the imagery. And they create harsh, bracing landscapes, with buildings huddled together as if for warmth, and images of a derrick fire that are Hadean in their power.

The memorable human images are of Plainview and his adopted son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), posing in a dignified tableau or simply walking the oil-rich land with a joint territorial lunge. It's when the movie needs to suggest a relationship deeper than an affable pseudo-family partnership that their dual intrigue dries up.

The parallel rise and fall of Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) never conjures any fascination. This fundamentalist preacher ends up catalyzing a string of confrontations with Plainview that become mortifying and dangerous for both men. Plainview sees through Sunday, one opportunist to another, but that brings as little texture to the drama as the way Plainview sees through himself. You leave the film thinking that Anderson abhors both material and spiritual domination. Well, who doesn't?

Anderson handled plot complications with finesse even in his 1997 debut film, Hard Eight, but here he goes butter-fingers at every turn. Sunday's apparent twin pops up to set the plot in motion, then disappears. And Plainview's neglect to nail down a parcel of land critical to his oil empire never makes any sense for the story or the character, especially when it connects to the film's two dumbfounding murders (accent on the dumb).

Anderson and Day-Lewis strip themselves of their natural talents for invention and poetry, as if any hint of romance, nobility or fun would soften the film. I gave Day-Lewis the benefit of the doubt for his fire-breathing excesses in Gangs of New York, but what seemed like eccentricity there (and at least kept the film alive) comes off as tired and methodical in There Will Be Blood. He and Anderson have tried to drill into an obdurate character the way Plainview drills into the unforgiving earth, but they've come up with a dry well.

>>> There Will Be Blood (Paramount Vantage) Starring Daniel Day-Lewis. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Rated R. Time 158 minutes.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com

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