Striking Oil, Striking Blood

What with its price tickling S100 a barrel at press time, and the U.S. allegedly not waging war for it all over the Middle East. there couldn't be a better time to make a movie out of Oil!, Upton Sinclair's muckraking 1927 novel about the petroleum industry—except for maybe pretty much any other time over the last 80 years. (The internalcombustion engine: the gift that keeps on giving.) Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation, renamed There Will Be Blood, is a free one: observations about the rapacious nature of capitalism are mostly implicit in what amounts to a magnificent, nearly three-hour character study of an independent oilman, Daniel Plainview, whose life goes epically sour. The star is Daniel Day-Lewis, whom we first see as a grubby miner in a mostly wordless sequence that has him breaking a leg at the bottom of a shaft, pulling himself out, and then, it is implied, crawling back to town, in agony all the way. And the performance only gets more intense from there, a marvel of controlled ferocity. (As my old friend and former .S/n-magazinc colleague Walter Monheit might say: There will be Oscar!) Plainview's main antagonist—aside from forces majeures, and his own carefully nursed misanthropy is a baby-faced preacher played by Paul Dano (the mute teenager in Little Miss Sunshine), but a conflicted man of the cloth proves no match for a relentless man of the earth. While the ending may go just a wee bit awry as it strains to fulfill the titular prophecy. Anderson, Day-Lew'is, and their collaborators have made a film as indelible as it is mysterious: tapping an oil field is a straightforward endeavor relative to tapping a human heart, especially when you risk drilling deep and when the heart is as black as crude.

BRUCE HANDY