There Will Be Blood (2007)

Slashed Arteries and Fractured Relationships

In There Will Be Blood, the gifted young writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson explores themes of greed, family, and religion through an erupting fountain of the world’s most valuable resource. Although loosely based on the first 150 pages of Upton Sinclair’s anti-capitalist novel Oil!, the movie intentionally diverges from Sinclair’s socialist message, instead teaching us a lesson in how not to live a life. Through Anderson’s prodigious filmmaking talents and an immortal performance by Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, the film’s ugly subject, There Will Be Blood leaves a permanent impression on all viewers who choose to immerse themselves in its richly realized universe of oil, money, and hatred.

Beginning in 1898, Anderson’s epic spans three decades in the life of a ruthless American capitalist, painting a grotesque portrait of a man stripped of his morality and devoid of any normal human emotions. Daniel Plainview’s sole ambition in life, as he confesses at one point, is to earn enough money to “get away from everyone.” Oil and money dominate every square inch of his consciousness, an endless circle of materialistic addiction. Oil leads to money, money leads to oil, and oil leads to more money. David Denby of The New Yorker aptly notes in his review, “[The movie] is about the driving force of capitalism as it both creates and destroys the future, and the film’s tone is at once elated and sickened.” Empty, angry, and loveless, Plainview’s quintessentially American obsession destroys everything in his life worth keeping, while simultaneously generating a wealth beyond his wildest dreams.

When a mysterious man named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) approaches the already-successful Daniel Plainview with information about an undrilled ocean of oil in southern California, Plainview and his adopted son H.W. travel from their home state of New Mexico to investigate. Upon the discovery of a vast reserve, Plainview promises the local town of Little Boston education, prosperity, and a new church for Paul’s devout twin brother Eli (also played by Paul Dano) to preach in. As a seemingly endless supply of oil explodes out of the ground, money flows and Plainview begins to devolve.

Daniel Day-Lewis’s masterful, Oscar-winning performance carries this film, maybe even more so than Paul Thomas Anderson’s remarkably sure hand. He’s in nearly every shot, and Anderson bends the movie to his will. As Manohla Dargis writes for The New York Times, “The actor seems to have invaded Plainview’s every atom, filling an otherwise empty vessel with so much rage and purpose you wait for him to blow.” For 158 minutes, Day-Lewis builds rage and madness so convincingly that Plainview appears not as a fictional character but as a living, breathing organism. The actor examines every nook and cranny of his character’s appearance and temperament, ensuring that no part of Daniel Plainview goes unexplored.

Parallels between oil and blood occur frequently in There Will Be Blood, often bleeding into one another as interchangeable ideas. Whenever Plainview hits oil, the black fluid gushes up from the ground as if from a slashed artery. Over the course of thirty years, Plainview builds his self-professed hatred for the people around him while nurturing his infatuation with oil. Blood is shed literally and figuratively as Plainview grows more and more dependent on his obsession—in addition to killing two men, he loses blood, so to speak, by gradually ruining his relationship with H.W., eventually calling his son “nothing more than a bastard from a basket.” I see it as no coincidence that Plainview actually appears oily—as if the oil has not only invaded his life and emptied his soul, but also permeated his skin. Perhaps oil, rather than blood, runs through Daniel Plainview’s veins.

Anderson explores his timeless themes through the stunningly fluid camerawork of cinematographer Robert Elswit, which includes Anderson’s trademark extra-long takes. But much of There Will Be Blood’s ambience emanates from Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s bizarre score. Greenwood sets the tone, scene after scene, with strange compositions of wails, clicks and pulses. David Denby of The New Yorker observes, “Once the derricks are up, Greenwood imitates the rhythmic thud of the drill bits and pumps with bustling passages of plucked strings and pounding sticks. [There Will Be Blood] has the pulse of the future in its rhythms.” A logical and timely editing pace gives the film additional tempo. Although lengthy, Anderson’s movie consistently holds the viewer’s attention by remaining concise and economical in its presentation of narrative.

Much has been said about There Will Be Blood’s controversial final scene. Some say it’s overacted, with a drunk Plainview shrieking “I drink your milkshake!” and “I am the Third Revelation!” while bludgeoning Eli Sunday to death with a bowling pin. But if we consider the extent to which Day-Lewis increasingly builds anger and tension throughout the movie, his final bloody act seems eerily fitting. “I’m finished!” he chirps gleefully after murdering Eli, soon before a Brahms violin concerto kicks in and a cut to black finishes it off. Although considered by many critics as a mistake, the scene actually reveals more about Anderson’s message than any other. Slant magazine’s Nick Schager had the same reaction I did: “While watching, the sequence struck me as so unexpectedly out-there that it felt like a last-second misstep, but, in retrospect, this bizarre, nasty, hilariously horrifying denouement now seems the ideal exclamation point for a film this focused on the suppression of grotesque inner impulses.” No one who lives a life like Daniel Plainview’s can possibly meet a sensible end.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s skills as a writer and director, combined with Daniel Day-Lewis’s mad and magnificent performance, shape this movie into one for the ages. Between violent explosions of oil, milkshakes and bowling pins, Anderson bombards viewers with a seminal cinematic vision at once meaningful and prophetic. And there lies the genius of the movie’s title: it refers not only to the context of Daniel Plainview’s actions, but also to oil’s brutal future in shaping the modern world. Wars will be fought over what Daniel Plainview gives his life over to. There will be blood, indeed.