(2007) Director/screenwriter Paul Thomas Anderson's film adaptation from Upton Sinclair's novel "Oil!" (originally based on the Teapot Dome scandal during the Harding administration) is dedicated to Robert Altman. Of the movies I've seen, the one that comes closest to being like this picture is Aviator with Howard Hughes as a man obsessed with doing everything his way until he finally goes insane.

Beginning at the bottom of a vertical silver-mine shaft with a fractured leg in 1898, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis in another captivating performance), a hard, harsh man, claws his way to the top with an oil strike in 1902 and dozens of further finds in California.

In an accident his partner's killed at the bottom of the first oil well, leaving Daniel with an orphaned baby boy, whom he names H.W. In addition to this and other accidental deaths, Daniel intentionally kills two men, one with a pistol shot to the head and the other with a bowling pin.

None of the characters in this film have appealing personalities. "I believe in plain speaking," says Plainview in 1911, "I'm an oil man." But he's anything but plain, attempting to pay quail prices for land he knows holds oil.

"I hate most people," he tells Henry (Kevin J. O'Connor), who claims to be Daniel's half brother. His overweening competitive spirit prevents him from wanting anyone else to succeed.

Even after he's made his fortune many times over, in the late 1920s he disowns H.W. when the young man announces his intention to go out on his own to Mexico and start an oil-drilling company: "This makes you my competitor. You're not my son. You're an orphan. I needed a sweet face to buy land. You have none of me in you. A bastard from a basket."

Stoical in his outward demeanor, he nevertheless loved the child. After the gusher erupts and catches fire on the Sunday ranch, which Daniel has purchased along with the surrounding properties, injuring ten-year-old H.W. (Dillon Freasier), resulting in his complete loss of hearing, he takes out his frustrations on Eli Sunday (Paul Dano, who also plays the twin brother Paul), self-proclaimed preacher and faith healer, for being unable to heal the boy: "a false prophet … God is a superstition."

He snubs Standard Oil's offer to buy him out for a million dollars (taking personal offense from a comment concerning his boy, "Don't tell me how to raise my family"), choosing instead out of spite as much as a desire to get a better return on his investment, to link up with Union Oil by constructing a pipeline from his wells in the vicinity of the Sunday ranch to the coast.

In order to lay the pipe efficiently he has to get permission from William Bandy to bury the pipeline across his property. Bandy's price is for Daniel to be "washed in the blood of Jesus Christ" for his sins (including the temporary abandonment of H.W., sent by train elsewhere to learn sign language) in the Church of the Third Revelation at the hands of his nemesis, Eli Sunday. Willing to do whatever it takes to achieve his own aims, he goes through with the baptism. There will be revenge for this humiliation.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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