'There Will Be Blood'

Rating:

BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

December 21, 2007

Marlene Dietrich used to extol in song the virtues of a man who takes his time. Were she still about, the screen diva might have had a soft spot for Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson, two artists known for the long, considered intervals that precede each of their film projects.

The Brit actor and American director have meandered into each other's paths for their newest film, a patient but intoxicating epic that Anderson has liberally reconstituted from Upton Sinclair's novel "Oil." It is about the old West, greed, faith, family and other issues of defining consequence to our national identity. "There Will Be Blood," as it is titled with ominous ambiguity, is the watershed achievement of both Day-Lewis' and Anderson's careers.

Disappearing into a thick, horsebrush mustache and a flat, polymorphous American accent, Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, an industrious turn-of-the-century silver miner who cultivates a nose for oil. (The character is said to be based on Edward Doheny, a prospector who ascended to the top of the Pan-American Petroleum and Transport Company). Working on a tip from a polite but resolute farmboy named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), he sets his sights on the rural California property of Sunday's impoverished family.

With his son H.W. in tow (the haunting 10-year-old Dillon Freasier), Plainview heads to the squalid town of Little Boston, where he poses as a quail hunter and tracks down his mother lode of oil. Standing between him and wealth is Paul's brother Eli (also Dano), a tiger of an operator in lamb-of-God disguise. Disarmed by the young man's quiet demands, Plainview parts with far more money than he intended for the Sunday land. Eli, in turn, sets about realizing his own dream: to build the town church.

The budding oil baron meets his match in the neophyte preacher, whose pacific facade conceals a controlling impulse that will dog Plainview as he builds his empire. Plainview intuits in Eli the threat of the like-minded: They are both calculating and unswerving in the pursuit of their respective goals. More significantly, perhaps, they are both poseurs. Eli conceals his ambitions under a cloak of piety, while Plainview uses the cozy hype of a family business to softsoap his monopolistic land acquisitions.

A psychotherapist could have a field day with Plainview, who yearns for family connection yet does everything in his power to sabotage it. The self-destructive force of that pathology becomes wrenchingly clear as he ushers his traumatized boy out the door not long after a long-lost brother (Kevin J. O'Connor) walks in.

Anderson's high-flying cinematic ambitions are worthy of Plainview and Eli, who devote as much fury to breaking each other's spirits as they do to amassing fortune. The dissonance in this archetypal American showdown is magnificently heightened by the percussive-string scoring of Jonny Greenwood (receiving buoyant assist from Dvorak) and the vivid widescreen compositions of cinematographer Robert Elswit.

Nothing Day-Lewis has done in the past fully prepares us for the vertiginous risks he takes as Plainview, who becomes more seductively dangerous with every scene. One could say the same for Dano, who makes a revelatory leap from the silent rebel of "Little Miss Sunshine" to a chillingly manipulative man of the cloth. When Eli first unveils his demonic underside in a demonstration of old-style faith healing, Dano lets loose a frigid blast of hellfire that could scare Elmer Gantry into early retirement.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD (PG-13). Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano make electrifying adversaries as an oil man and a clergyman in Paul Thomas Anderson's exhilarating drama. Jonny Greenwood wrote the stunning string score. 2:38 (some violence). Opens Wednesday at AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13, Manhattan.