There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is many things*, but what it isn't is dull, which is what surprised me the most. A tale of an oil man who gets rich and eventually sees his world crumble at his own hands isn't a particularly intriguing one to me, but I forgot what special qualities PTA brings to his pictures. Loosely based on Upton Sinclair's novel, Oil!, Anderson borrowed strictly the framework, and with his creativity molded a modern American masterpiece of cinema.

(Hyperbole! Than again, maybe not.)

Whereas Quentin Tarantino doesn't hide his influences and tends to blatantly showcase every nook and cranny of his often-obscure lexicon of filmmaking through character dialogue, music, and scene construction, Anderson is more subtle, and, thusly, more palatable to a certain demographic of cinephiles who scoff whenever they notice a nod or homage to directors who have come before. I'll admit that most of the stuff Tarantino "borrows" is caliginous to me, and maybe that's why I give him a free pass; if I were well-versed in myriad sub-genres of film, maybe I wouldn't let the loveable pothead so easily off the hook. Then again, I probably would, because despite a lack of pure invention, every idea he lifts is reborn as something new, something entertaining.

Paul Thomas Anderson is a lot less obvious in his inspiration, but it's still there. It's just a little subtler. And like Tarantino, the man has the will to turn every one of his influences into something equal to -- or greater than -- its source material.

Take Boogie Nights, for example. Anyone smarter than a bucket of hair noticed Martin Scorsese's influence, but that doesn't stop the film from being one of the greatest movies of the 90s. Because instead of flat-out aping one of his heroes, Anderson topped his masterpiece with Scorseseesque direction -- and a soundtrack as keen as the master's -- like katsuobushi on top of the tastiest okonomiyaki. That culinary reference may be oblique**, but it's proper; top chefs, after all, learn from the best, and they carry with them the knowledge they've acquired.

In food or film, it's not easy to define yourself as unique. Original? Damn near impossible. Anderson has loads of uniqueness. Originality, well...

Maybe that's why I can't say There Will Be Bowling is a better film than Boogie Nights. Because Nights was such an obvious-yet-overlooked subject: the porn industry. The power and corruption of oil, however? Like your mom's vagina, that territory's been charted more times than I can count.

Still, while I may be suffering from every fanboys' instinct to proclaim the most recent work by one of his favorite artists as "the best," it's a fucking close call. There Will Be Blood touched me in the right places at the right time. And that's no mean feat. Because I have leprosy.

Quick synopsis: Daniel Plainview is looking for gold, finds oil, gets a kid, gets rich. Gets richer. Occasionally, he has bouts of treating people cruelly and slapping the shit out of them, but such acts of violence are offset by his desperate desire to be kind, or a reasonable hand-drawn facsimile thereof. But not really. Eventually, his selfishness and failure to establish any sort of bond with those closest to him lead to his downfall. (I've heard it's Kobe Bryant's favorite movie.) In the end -- and I'm confused -- he professes his love for a certain beverage made of milk and ice cream***.

Sounds kinda boring, right? Therein, friends and Navers, lies the magic. Not for a second is the film anything other than engaging.

Original? Well...

Aside from Paul Dano's wonderful turn as Paul and Eli Sunday -- which is at first awkward, then weird, then weirder****, and, eventually, sublime -- There Will Be Cribbing. Daniel Plainview is a fucked-up amalgamation of Charles Foster Kane and Tony Montana; the opening scenes are reminiscent of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (never a bad thing).

I'm sure that the more

(I drink, the prettier you'll look)

I watch it, the more I'll notice; but from the opening title, to Johnny Greenwood's score reminiscent of the opening music to 2001: A Space Odyssey, to that long shot of the bowling alley, and the carnage that occurs thereafter, Stanley Kubrick's legacy is the biggest impression I was left with after seeing the film for the first time.

And didn't it feel good.

Also: who would ever believe that Tom Selleck would win an Oscar?



* How's that for a vague, trite opening sentence?

** I've been watching too much Hell's Kitchen.

*** You have three guesses.

**** I'm no clair(forlani)voyant, but I have to imagine/know that filming Dano, especially during his healing sessions, was the most fun Anderson had during filming.