There Will be Testosterone

Dillion Freasier and Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. (Photo by Francois Duhamel/Paramount Vantage)

There Will Be Blood is a great American portrait, a pitch-perfect, prospector archetype captured in a virtuoso solo effort by Daniel Day Lewis. It is framed more than it is directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (who adapted it from Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel, Oil!), who knows well enough to establish the principals and then get out of their way. In a sense, the movie succeeds despite Anderson, who has derailed previous efforts like Magnolia with heavy-handed indications that he aspires for high art. Though there are hints of this troublesome tendency throughout Blood, this time he pulls off a classic—and, more surprisingly, an important commentary on the masculine gender.

The movie opens with a gesture that risks being a gimmick. Anderson introduces Blood with an overlong, silent segment. Emphasizing the featurelessness and abandon of the American West at the turn of the century, the film finds Daniel Plainview (the protagonist, played by Day Lewis) toiling alone in a silver mine. Plainview strikes silver even as the viewer gets the first hint at the film's non-metaphorical title: He falls when a roughshod mine ladder collapses, breaking a leg. Clutching a gob of silver ore, Plainview drags himself out of the mine and to the nearest trading post, where his leg is not quite set right; the throbbingly slow pace of the sequence suggests this is no short crawl.

The sequence establishes early on the themes that will hold throughout the film—the most important being Plainview’s dominating presence, a brusque and physical force on the order of magnitude of Marlon Brando's sultry showing as Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire. The film prods the question of whether Plainview is motivated more by the will to survive or by the will to profit greatly, even as he endures ghastly emotional traumas.

Another long form visual sequence establishes Plainview's rival, enemy, and spiritual cohort, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), the upstart preacher who hopes to counter Plainview's interest in the California fields where Plainview—on a tip from Eli's brother Paul (also played by Dano)—has struck oil. Sunday is the Pentecostal shepherd of the Church of the Third Revelation. When Plainview steps into Sunday's small home–sized church one morning, the viewer is treated to a mini-revival—one rendered in a long panning shot by Anderson, who follows Sunday as he delivers (in a pitched, rasping voice more typically associated with God's enemy than his prophet) a congregant from the Satanically inspired pain of arthritis. The pan follows the gesticulating, teenage-faced faith healer as he abandons the pulpit, works the crowd, and even exits the front door in his frenzy. Plainview doesn't buy it. As the town and industry develop, he won't buy into it—refusing Sunday's suggestion that he bless the oil well, or (perhaps more knowingly) refusing to submit the town's precious well to the sway of anyone but himself. Despite their mutual distrust, Plainview and Sunday develop a strange, occasional symbiosis: The one depends on the other when it is in his interest to do so.

There are no women in There Will Be Blood (notwithstanding the ardent schoolmarms who form the core of Sunday's supporters). But there is a great deal of family. Disaster visits Plainview when an explosive accident takes the hearing of his adopted son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier)—who entered into Plainview's trust much earlier, when an accident at another well took the life of the boy's father. (The boy's mother is not referenced.) Shortly after H.W.'s accident, Plainview sends the child away, for reasons that will vary with interpretation: H.W.'s needs as a deaf child compete for Plainview's attention to his work; Plainview is uncomfortable with his son's impairment; Plainview is uncomfortable with a son, full stop. When a man who bills himself as Plainview's half-brother emerges (after Plainview has struck it quite big), Plainview adopts him, too. For a time, this man (Harry Brands, played by Kevin J. O'Connor) serves as H.W.'s substitute—the humanizing face of Plainview's operation, his right-hand man.

Whether son, brother, or rival ever matter more to Plainview than their potential to further his interests is plain by the end of the film. He is by the end what he claims to be all along—an “oil man,” simply and completely. Some of the scenes that establish denouement—in particular, a momentous exchange between Plainview and an adult H.W.—fall short of the nuance that characterizes these relationships throughout the film. That nuance owes entirely to Day Lewis's performance. All the men orbit in an axis around Plainview, but whether at the center of that gravity is Plainview the man or Plainview the oil man vacillates—significantly, and sometimes within even single scenes. The unspoken bonds between the men that, indeed, seem barely forged, emerge whenever Plainview suffers financial setbacks. When his industry is most vulnerable, he is most vulnerable.

It is hardly a revision of the traditional Western conception of masculinity. Plainview is no more forthcoming emotionally than any Texas Tycoon–type that has been depicted before him. Inhabited by Day Lewis, however, the limitations and the modes of this silent type are tested. Plainview is not faithful to Sinclair's original, who is more sympathetic and magnanimous. Instead this Plainview is faithful to the heroic, entrepreneurial, frontier type imagined by Westerns and other Hollywood period pieces. Day Lewis establishes that type and then, impossibly, gives it extraordinary range.

Hollywood—and art, considered more broadly—is drilling deep into the male gender. It's as if men are only now confronting the fact that they also have a gender; not in any 90s–sensitivity sense of the word but a complete and coherent gender as worthy of investigation as the gender of women, whose study formed an important part of the social, political, and artistic current of the 20th century. With There Will Be Blood, Anderson and Day Lewis win by asking—not in an infantilizing or trivializing way but in sincerity and with all due respect—if you prick us, will our blood not gush?

Kriston Capps is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C. He writes for the Washington City Paper and blogs at Grammar Police.