'Blood': Unrefined oil

"There Will Be Blood" opens with a 17-minute prologue that's completely without dialogue and completely riveting.

It features Daniel Day-Lewis as a gaunt, turn-of-the-century prospector digging a pit in the hard soil of the barren West. He's constructed a rickety scaffold and lowers himself into the hole he's hacked out with an iron pick. When the contraption fails, he falls with a thud and breaks his leg - a grisly, painful accident that seems to bother the man less than the fact that he's found nothing of value.

Indeed, he crawls out and gets right back to work - this is a fellow willing to die, to endure extreme pain and privation, for a nugget of silver.

What might he do for a gusher of oil? The answer forms the spectacle of ruthlessness, rapaciousness and compulsive competition that constitutes "There Will Be Blood."

It runs some 160 minutes, but the movie's ideas are condensed in that terrific opening sequence, which continues as the man, whose name is Plainview, strikes oil.

He fashions a crude derrick and recruits a few hands to do the dangerous work of drilling. When the process kills a man, Plainview adopts his orphaned son, marking the boy on the forehead with a smear of oil.

Yes, film students, it's a baptism. The oil is the blood of the earth, and Plainview's ruthless exploitation of it is presented as both an indictment of greed and a crime against nature.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson ("Magnolia," "Boogie Nights") is more concerned here with the former, as befits the source material - a novel by socialist muckraker Upton Sinclair titled "Oil!"

Anderson adapts Sinclair's work to show us the dark side of the oil patch saga - heretofore presented as alpha male entrepreneurship and free-spirited, frontier wildcatting told in pop stories like "Giant" and "Dallas."

"There Will Be Blood" strips away all glamour and lives-of-the-rich-and-famous fawning. Plainview is an angry, greedy miser, too obsessed with his next deal, well or pipeline to be interested in the accumulation of material things.

To that end, the movie takes place on flaming, sooty oil fields, dotted with simple wooden structures, full of people who look like they're posing for Grant Wood or Thomas Hart Benton.

When Plainview undertakes his grand scheme to defeat Big Oil by running a pipeline from his productive inland fields to the Pacific, he does the surveying on foot and on horseback, in a single suit of clothes.

That this insistently grim movie remains watchable is due in large measure to Day-Lewis, playing another wild-eyed eccentric (shades of Bill the Butcher) to mesmerizing effect.

Many have noted that Day-Lewis has chosen to mimic John Huston, but I think it's a specific reference - to Huston's Noah Cross, the deck-stacking capitalist of "Chinatown." Cross was a man not above defiling his own children, and Plainview is a close cousin - he grows estranged from his adoptive son, until we begin to see that the boy was always a useful mascot for Plainview's sales pitch about family values.

The obviously iconic "There Will Be Blood" has already been compared to the work of John Ford and D.W. Griffith, but I don't know. I'm pretty sure Ford or Griffith would have put a girl in there somewhere.

You'd get an allegorical deconstruction of the capitalist strain in our nation's creation myth, but you'd also get Maureen O'Hara. There isn't the least concession here to entertainment, and I'll admit that Anderson's fixed stare on Plainview's increasingly demented profiteering eventually wore me down.

There is meant to be a narrative kick to Plainview's running feud with an evangelist/charlatan (Paul Dano) on whose swindled land his oil empire is founded (Bible-thumping also denounced), but I found their test of will to lack the grandeur of the rest of the movie. Truth is, Dano's just not in Day-Lewis' class. Not even close.

Their final showdown, in Plainview's West Coast palace (it's Xanadu with a bowling alley), fulfills the prophecy of the title, but left me more relieved than horrified. *

Produced by Paul Thomas Anderson, Daniel Lupi and JoAnne Sellar, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, music by Jonny Greenwood, distributed by Paramount Vantage.