There Will Be Blood
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Over the course of three decades, from 1898 to 1927, we watch an admirable and indomitable man slowly but relentlessly decline into a despicable and indefensible monster. That is the arc of There Will Be Blood, the justly celebrated but very difficult new film. Its protagonist is a prospector and entrepreneur named Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), who begins as a lone miner digging for gold in the California mountains and ends as a rich oilman drunk and alone in the bowling alley inside his Hollywood mansion.

Plainview is, like the movie that contains him, profoundly eccentric and very interesting. And because of how singular a character he is, Plainview does not seem to be a symbol of anything. He is not the personification of capitalism run amok, or the oil business, or America in the 20th century. For that reason alone, There Will Be Blood rises above the model of socialist agitation provided by Upton Sinclair, who wrote the novel on which it is loosely based.

But as conceived by writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, and acted to a fare-thee-well by Day-Lewis, Plainview doesn't symbolize anything other than the human soul's tragic capacity to shrivel away. The spellbinding first 15 minutes of the movie feature only a few words of spoken dialogue, as Anderson works with riveting force to establish Plainview's great personal strength and iron determination. We begin with him literally in a hole 50 feet deep, a mine he has dug with his own hands.

He climbs out, drinks coffee, sets a dynamite charge, loses his footing, and tumbles into his own hole, shattering a leg. Seizing a rock of gold, he manages to hoist himself out of the mine and onto his back on a rocky mountainside. Whereupon the 38-year-old Anderson, in a single moment proving himself the finest director of his generation, pulls the camera back to show Plainview's isolation. He is alone, in the middle of nowhere. He will have to drag himself on his back for miles and miles on jagged rock to save his own life and secure his fortune.

Here and throughout, as he did in his Oscar-winning turn as a quadriplegic in My Left Foot and an 18th-century woodsman in The Last of the Mohicans, Daniel Day-Lewis demonstrates a physical commitment to performance that makes American method actors look like dilettantes and hacks.

As Plainview journeys through life, he shows signs of a nobility of spirit, in particular by taking in a child left orphaned and raising him with great kindness as his own. He also gives contradictory indications of being a bamboozling hustler, talking poverty-stricken Californians out of their share of the oil fortunes he is shrewd enough to see on their lands. He is a strange and unfathomable person, defiantly uncategorizable. The problem is that the movie probably would have benefited from a conscious and obvious effort on Anderson's part to turn Plainview into a symbolic representation of America at its worst. Such a decision would have been artistically questionable and politically noxious. But it would have made watching There Will Be Blood a more satisfying experience because it would have given the movie a broader and more mythic scope.